If you are an university using salesforce crm or planning to use salesforce, here are some cool features in summer 16 which would make life easy for your current users and provide more capability as well.

Marketing and Student recruitment

Contacts with multiple accounts

With Summer 16, contacts can now be associated with multiple accounts which would help to track relationships of your students better. If your student works with multiple companies, the new feature would help to track the employee history and as well as the relationship level which would to leverage donations and internships. You can also track family relationships between students and their parents and family with this new feature. Now if you are using non profit starter pack or planning to use HEDA, you might want to stay away from this feature and leverage the existing apps for it.

Update Details for Converted Leads
If you have prospective students and when they raise their hand, most of the universities convert the lead to contact record. Now with summer 14, you can edit converted leads and update their actual program of interest and school information. Now  the real value of this feature would be to associate the lead to contact record where you can view a student record and view the related lead record on the contact detail page.  We have a pre built conversion solution which converts leads to contacts automatically without creating duplicates and still able to see the lead record on the contact page.

One stop service centers

Workorder capability

If you are an IT department or one stop service center and  want to track your repairs or work orders on computers or devices used by students, work order object makes it easy to track and also provide you a process to follow up and complete workorders. Please click here for further information on release notes.

Enable students to update asset information

If you are using communities for your students, students can now update assets which are now exposed to communities. This would help to track different university assets used by students and provide real time information on assets.

Prevent problems on Articles
If you are using articles and sharing articles with students, you can now create validation rules on different article types which would help you to have minimal information captured on different articles. This would reduce your support times as students will be able to access the articles and enable self service.  You can also create different service levels for different category of students or your internal staff and expose different articles based on their profiles. Article types are now available on different profiles. Please click here for further information on release notes.

Macros now available on all objects
If you are using service console , your one stop service center can now access macros and can get jobs done faster on all objects with few clicks. With macros available on api ,with custom code,  you can have your service console display most frequently used macros and increase adoption . Please click here for further information on release notes.

Student and Alumni communities.
If you are using student and alumni communities, Files can be previewed and displayed on posts. You can also attach more files on your posts easily increase engagement with your student community.   Please click here for further information on release notes.

Social customer service

With summer 16,  you can now create cases from your student on their favorite channel like twittter and facebook and colloborate with them on their preferred channel of communication. You can also moderate the posts and have a process to create cases from your twitter posts. Please click here for further information on release notes.

More objects available on your community

If you are using napoli template, you can now view leads, campaign members and opportunities in your student community. Using campaign members, students can respond to events or appointments on student success which would provide you real time tracking of campaigns. Please click here for further information on release notes.
If you are using napoli template, you can create leader boards which would help to identify knowledge experts in your communities easily. This would help students to reach the right expert on questions increasing adoption and engagement. Please click here for further information on release notes.

Addon capability
Force.com and Chatter Plus Users Have Read Access to Knowledge articles
Administrators can grant Force.com and Chatter Plus users read access to Knowledge articles without the Knowledge User license. For new orgs, the Force.com and Chatter Plus users have read access by default. For existing orgs, enable the “Allow View Knowledge” permission by profile. The Knowledge user license is still needed to create, edit, or manage Articles knowledge expanded to chatter plus and force.com. This would help external support centers to close cases easily.

prevent problems

You can copy sandboxes from existing ones . This would help to share sandboxes with external developers and clone them easily. You can also create custom  scripts to refresh sandboxes which would help to create preconfigured custom settings and test data available for developers to test their changes easily. Please click here for further information on release notes.

insight

This feature helps to report on how users see the files, search terms entered and results returned. This would help to manage files and search terms better. Please click here for further information on release notes.

Please feel free to post your comments on the feature which you think might be of value to you. If you have any further questions, please feel free to email me at buyan@eigenx.com.