If you are an university or a college trying to evaluate the HEDA package or installed it, one of the common questions is how do i manage my students who dont work for a company and organizations whom my university wants to have a relationship with. The challenge is how do I keep the students separate from the organization contacts and still some how link them if the student works for multiple companies. My post here would help you to identify the right strategies and prevent major problems later.

1. Use separate record types for Students and Organizations.
2. Use affilations to manage relationships
3.  Things to consider for data merge
4. Things to consider for data migration.

Use separate record types for Students and Organizations.

The default HEDA model has 2 record types for accounts namely the academic account and organization record type. So when you create a student record who does not work for a company, if you give the company name blank, HEDA will create a contact and account with the student name with academic account record type. If you want to create an organization, create an account with organization record type. This will help you to differentiate between the 2 account record types easily. Here are things you need to consider.

1. Make sure that the record types are enabled for the user profile otherwise they will not show up when you create students and organizations.
2. Use affilations to manage relationships
3. If you want your grad and undergrad to just create students, just enable academic contact record type for the users on the profile.

Managing Students with HEDA screenshot

B2B Accounts with HEDA

Using Affiliations to manage relationships

If the student later joins a company, you can use affiliations object to manage the relationship. In this scenario, you would create an affiliation record which would link the contact and the account. You can use role picklist to define the role which the student has with the organization. If an organization has another relationship with an organization like a foundation linked to an account, you can create an affiliation relationship between the accounts.

Things to consider for data merge

If you have duplicate student records when you try to merge them, there will be a possibility of creating duplicate affiliations on the student record.  This would also happen if you merge 2 organizations as well, there is also a possibility on creating duplicate affiliations as well. To avoid this, the following things have to be considered.

1. Before you merge your student contacts, make sure you merge the duplicate affiliation records first and then merge the contacts.
2. When you merge the accounts, also merge the affiliation records first and then the parent account record.

Things to consider for data migration

If you have a SIS system like Banner and would like to migrate the student records to HEDA,  here are things which you should consider on preparing the data.

1. For students who dont have a company, blank out the company name column which would help in creating contacts with administrative account record type.
2. If you have an employment history of students who work for multiple companies, you would have to create an affiliation record for each record in the employment history.
3. In a scenario, if you have to load organizations, load the organizations first and then the contacts.

So using the above strategic choices, you can easily manage individual students and students who work for organizations. To summarize here are the key takeaways

1. Use administrative account for individual students and organization record type for organizations.
2. Use affilations to manage the relationships between students who work for multiple companies.
3. When you do data merging, always merge the child records first like affilaitions and then accounts.

Please feel free to post your comments and email me at buyan@eigenx.com for further questions.