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 Cloud for Good Blog | Apr 14, 2015 | Blog
This is a cross post from the Cloud for Good blog. At Dreamforce 2013, I had the opportunity to spend time with our fantastic Cloud for Good team, see some great sessions, meet some of our amazing customers and co-present two separate sessions. One of those sessions was entitled ‘Growing Pains: Scaling Your Salesforce Implementation’ and I worked with fellow MVP’s Mary Pustejovsky and Brian Kwong to discuss some of the issues and considerations that customers of any sort should take into account when expanding their use of Salesforce (you can see the session slides and here the audio on YouTube here). I thought it might be useful to expand on one of the topics covered in more detail: Establishing Good Governance. If you Google/Bing/Yahoo the term Governance, you will be presented with a variety of definitions, but fundamentally they boil down to ‘a method or system of government or management’. In non-profit (and even general corporate) terms governance is most often referred to in terms of the relationship between the Board of Directors and the organization and the rules that establish how organizations will function. When working with Salesforce.com (or any system for that matter), following the principles of good governance can make life easier for administrators and users alike by providing a clear and consistent framework to manage change over time and defining processes to resolve conflicting requirements. In our experience, governance is often an evolutionary process, consisting of three stages: Monarchy, Democracy and Republic Stage 1: Monarchy For many organizations, nonprofits in particular, the use of the system often starts off in a very limited fashion, supporting...
