If you are a college or university using HEDA or planning to use HEDA, one of the challenges is to deal with multiple addresses of your prospective and registered students. This post would help you to make decisions on migrating to HEDA with your students and also how to manage your addresses going forward with HEDA.

1. Migrating multiple addresses from your SIS to HEDA For Students.

If you are planning to migrate to HEDA from your SIS system like Banner, Janzibar etc, you have always have student tables with multiple addresses. Now with HEDA, there is a multiple address option which you can turn on using the HEDA settings.  If you have your student address data in a csv or excel format or even in an oracle or sql server table, here are the things which you want to do initially.

a. Identify the most recent address of the student using date modified in your SIS system  and consider that as your default address.

b. Create an external id field on the address custom object called SIS Address ID which has to be unique . This would be the unique id of your SIS database table.

c. If you are well versed in sql manipulation, you can export the address object using data loader or Jitterbit to a sql server or Oracle table. You can then load the table from your native student and address tables.

d. After the tables are loaded, make sure the most recent address record has the default address checkbox turned on  to true.

e. Finally export the data from this table and load them to salesforce address object by doing upsert.

f. You always want to use the SIS Address id as the upsert key. With this approach, you can always update the addresses easily even if you have to do this multiple times.

1. Things to consider.

A. If you have updated the contact mailing or billing address directly first , then HEDA will create an address record on the address object using the default address.

B. If you update the mailing address or billing address on the contact, HEDA will update the address record on the address object if you have checked the address option.

Quirky delete Issue

One issue you would always see after the data load in HEDA,  if you try to delete the default address record , the address record seems to be deleted and it restores back after some time. So to remove the default address which you have done by mistake, here is what you should do.

a. Always remove the address from the mailing or billing address on the contact first.

b. Uncheck the default address on the address record and make sure another address record is marked as default address.

c. Then delete the address record.

This looks a bit cumbersome but i hope it is fixed in the upcoming HEDA releases.

So to recap, here are the key takeaways for HEDA addresses.

1. When you load the address for the first time, identify which address you would keep as default for the student in your SIS and do an upsert using the HEDA address id which will save a lot of time on subsequent data loads.
2.  If you want to delete the existing default address on a student, update the mailing and billing address on the contact, uncheck the default option on the record and then delete it.

Here is a great link on HEDA address documentation which would further help you to understand this further. Please feel free to email me at buyan@eigenx.com for further questions.