by Rachel Natik | Jun 20, 2017 | Blog
LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE Since August 25, 2015, the Salesforce ecosystem has been buzzing with excitement over the Lightning Experience, a revolutionary update to Salesforce as we know it. Lightning, or LEX as it is often called, is more than just a visual change. It will change the future of Salesforce and how we all use it. The Lightning framework allows a user to create custom pages and layouts, using standard and custom components, while greatly enhancing the user experience and interface. Lightning has become famous for its drag and drop Opportunity Board, customizable Home Page, redesigned List Views, enhanced Dashboard layouts and assistant led record pages. Other features native to LEX are the sleek and more responsive interface, improved Lookup fields that auto-search records as you type, and an enhanced date picker field. In January 2017, Congregation Connect shared that switching to Lightning was on the roadmap. Attendees at the NATA/NASA conference were shown a high-level demonstration of what LEX would look like down the road. We are excited to announce that the School Module is fully Lightning ready. Over the summer, all Congregation Connect instances will be introduced to some Lightning properties in the School Module. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR YOU? For this release, Congregation Connect users do not need to take any specific actions to utilize the Lightning features. The release is built directly into the Classic experience and will be accessible once our next release is generally available. Users will have the same functionality they have had until now, with an upgraded interface. The School Module contains 5 features that have been upgraded to LEX: Schedule Meetings Button: Users will continue accessing...
by Rachel Natik | May 18, 2017 | Blog
Does your synagogue have a Hebrew Day/Religious School program? Do you wish that you could better manage your students and enrollments? With the Congregation Connect School Module, having a 360° view of your school has never been so easy. Our School Module takes the hard work out of classroom management and provides a streamlined process to record your data. Let’s start with the students, otherwise known as Contacts. Use the Contact record to store pertinent and personal information for each student. Customized fields to store medical information and emergency contacts are already included within the module. The Household Account record will also provide further insights into the student, such as parent names and with their contact information. The Class object is used for each course offered within your school. For example, you may have a separate Class for each grade up until 4th grade. The 5th and 6th grade classes may have a beginner and advanced track so you would be able create separate class records for each. Meetings represent the actual sessions that each class has. The 2nd grade may meet weekly on Wednesday at 4:00 pm. The 6th grade advanced class may meet weekly, on Mondays & Thursdays at 6:00 pm. You can use the Schedule Meetings tool to quickly create all the meeting records by selecting the date parameters for these meetings. To enroll students in a class, simply create an enrollment record, linking a Contact to a Class. You can indicate their enrollment date and drop-out information, as needed. As you enroll students, the number of Enrolled Students on the Class record will update with the current total. On Thursday,...
by Rachel Natik | Jul 14, 2016 | Blog
Congregation Connect is a managed application on the Salesforce platform for synagogues to manage their members. Below, we have compiled a list of the top 10 reasons Synagogues are using Congregation Connect. 1. It’s in the cloud. Congregation Connect is completely based online and can be accessed anywhere, at any time – as long as you have internet access! You are no longer limited to servers or your office computer. Easily connecting with your congregation, and having a dynamic, up-to-date view of your organization has never been easier. Our scheduled releases are automatically pushed into the system, without requiring you to download or install anything. 2. It’s mobile! Yes, more than being cloud-based, Congregation Connect is easily accessible from your mobile phone or tablet. With a simple navigation menu and intuitive functionality, you can have a 360 degree view of your synagogue at any given moment. A few screen clicks is all it takes to record a visit with a congregant, update contact information, or create an internal follow-up task. These are just some use cases of what can be done with Salesforce1 – the mobile app. 3. It’s for synagogues. Congregation Connect was designed to suit the religious needs of synagogues. With 3 complete synagogue modules (Financials, Membership, School) we have all the components you need to manage your organization. Some of our most popular features includes Yahrzeit tracking, Torah readings (Aliyot), automatic Hebrew date conversions, and Religious/Hebrew School enrollment. 4. It’s functional. Being a synagogue administrator can be a rather complex position with multiple duties and various details and task to track. Congregation Connect offers an abundance of functions to cover all your...
by Rachel Natik | Feb 8, 2016 | Blog
On January 28, 2016, Congregation Connect was upgraded to Version 3.2X to better serve your congregation, your mission, and you! This release includes many great enhancements, bug fixes and feature requests. If you have not yet reviewed the release notes, you definitely need to check them out. Additionally, this Release also includes a training video to guide you in this upgrade. Below are some of the top new features we are excited to share with you: – Increased flexibility in defining the household Contact 1 and Contact 1. Use the “Contact Type” field on the Contact record to define a contact’s status within the household. – New Visualforce component to display the Bar/Bat Mitzvah Torah Portion. This allows your Contact record page to function as a regular Salesforce page, display custom fields and layouts, and calculate the appropriate Torah portion. – Meeting Attendee “Date” field auto-populates according to the date entered on the corresponding Meeting record. This saves time on data entry, while ensuring the accuracy of your records. – Loose Transactions are placed in daily Batches, according to their input interface. At the end of the day, Batches are closed and can be marked to export. – Many additional options for exporting financial information with the Transaction Exporter have been added. You can choose the fields to include in the export, multiple summary options and even filter on GL Batch dates. – Some of our great portal enhancements include a new domain name, managing credit cards directly from the portal, the ability to print tax letters by month or year, options to display the Shabbat and Jewish calendar, more field columns available in the “My Finances” page...
by Rachel Natik | Mar 24, 2015 | Blog
We could not be more excited about to talk about the Spring 2015 release of Congregation Connect. When we start planning a release we give our releases an internal code name and the name this release was “Listening.” This highlights our focus for this release, which was to take the feedback we have been hearing from you, our clients, and really listen to what you were telling us. We then used that information to determine what improvements we should prioritize. You may not have known it, but you helped define what made it into this release. Thank you for being fantastic customers! We have heard that some areas of the product are not as easy to use or as robust in functionality as you want. We have also heard some areas are not easy to maintain without assistance from us. We focused on those 3 areas for this release and are thrilled to highlight now just a few of the over 75 changes made to Congregation Connect. You can look forward to our release announcement in just a few weeks. The announcement will include information on how to install the Spring 2015 release and where to find the full release notes. Ease of Use Virtual Terminal: Refund Processing Having to leave Congregation Connect to go over to Authorize.net to process a refund was not the user experience we wanted our clients to have. That is why we have added in the functionality to process a refund directly from within the Virtual Terminal in Congregation Connect. Tax Calculation Having only one way to calculate the split between tax deductible...
