What the Salesforce Summer ‘19 Release Means for Higher Ed

By: Natalie Vaynberg, Success Content Specialist & Lightning Ambassador and Keri Fadden, Manager, Education Success Content & Lightning Ambassador

Summer is here, which means welcoming new alumni, preparing for a whole new group of students, and getting ready for a whole new suite of features and upgrades from Salesforce! From helping you celebrate successes to improving your case management and reporting, these new features will give you plenty to be excited about. Check out our top five new features from the Summer ’19 release for Salesforce.org Education Cloud customers.

In-App Guidance

Your campus ecosystem is complex, so how do you make sure that everyone is on the same page? In-app guidance is here to make it easier! Now you can onboard and train users with automatic prompts. Highlight changes, introduce new features, or simply reinforce best practices with this flexible new feature. For example, you can add a Prompt to remind your student advisors of important upcoming dates and deadlines like the final day for students to drop a course or the last day of classes for the semester.

Best of all, in-app guidance is done entirely with clicks, not code. And since nobody knows your org better than you do, you have complete control over where to place your prompts, who should see them, and when.

Path Celebration: Virtual Confetti!

Cheer the success of your staff, students, or alumni with virtual confetti when you use the Path Celebration component. Enable the Celebration feature, customize what sets it off and you are ready to celebrate! Create a little fun every time someone reaches a milestone, like being admitted as a new student, completing graduation requirements, or closing on a major gift from a donor.

Embed Images in Emails

Most of us learn better and remember more when visuals are involved. Using images in emails makes them more engaging, more fun, and, let’s face it, more likely to be read. That’s why Salesforce has made it easier than ever to embed images in your emails. Simply choose an image that lives on your desktop or specify the URL and you have an improved eye-catching email, ready to be sent to that prospective student you’ve been recruiting.

Case Merge

Tired of dealing with duplicate cases? If your students are reaching out to you through multiple channels–Twitter, email and your website, it’s likely that you’ve come across this problem. With Case Merge, you can easily combine any duplicate cases to clean up your queue. The new merged record will include everything from related lists to feed items and Child records. You can even specify which fields you want to include or update in the merge.

Row-Level Reporting

No more creating custom formula fields that you will never need again in Salesforce. Now you can create formula fields right in your reports. Create a virtual column, write your formula, and get the information you need–all within the report builder!

Get excited to streamline and improve your Salesforce org this summer with any one of these great new features. Whether showering your advancement fundraisers in confetti, guiding advisors to relevant dates, simplifying student self-service cases with case merge, embedded email images to prospective students, or taking advantage of row-level reporting, the Summer ‘19 release has got you covered. Check out the full list of new releases and register for our Summer ‘19 Release Webinar on July 18.