Use a CRM like SalesForce as a Student Information System ( SIS ) ?

[ted_curran]

Our organization is pretty different than the traditional ed institution, and we have always used our legacy LMS as the master record of student information. Now that we're on Canvas, that's not recommended. We have been using Salesforce as an ancillary system to track student support transactions, but were wondering if it wouldn't be best to use it to track all student records?

I know that Southern New Hampshire University​ uses a modified version of SalesForce to drive their competency based program, and while I'm new to working with CRM systems, I see how it can be useful to track important interactions and milestones in a student's educational career.

Does your institution use CRM? Does it interact with Canvas at all, and if so, how? I'd be really interested to hear how institutions are using CRM to extend Canvas' abilities, especially when it comes to tracking student progress.

Thanks!
Ted.

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi  @ted_curran ​...

I'm sorry to see that your question has been sitting unanswered since you first posted this question on September 30th.  Have you been able to find out any information on your own since your posting that you would be willing to share with members of the Canvas Community?  If so, please feel free to post that information before.  I am going to share your question with the Canvas Developers​ and SIS & Integrations​ groups here in the Canvas Community in hopes that your question will get some additional exposure.  If you are not following either of these groups, click on the links I've provided and then click on the "Follow" link at the top right corner of the page.  I hope this helps, Ted!

[nr2522]

Hi,  @ted_curran ​.

We had a prior discussion on this topic ()Anyone aware of a Salesforce integration with Canvas? Any info gratefully received!), which proved inconclusive.

At Columbia Business School, we recently approved a project to undertake this for our ExecEd program (non-degree courses). We may end up farming out the work to a third party, but have left open the possibility of doing it in house. We're comfortable with the Canvas end of things (since we use it for our degree programs, but not with Salesforce). We need to figure out how to extract what we need from Salesforce.

Best,

Nelson

[janderson11]

though a year late I wanted to share  @ted_curran ‌ et al. that there are helpful SalesForce Training materials on Lynda.com... Im going through them myself as I can ... Learning Salesforce  hth

[Jeff_F]

One trick is to search for news releases on new ventures and then correlate the list back to known Canvas customers.  Then reach out to persons listed in the article directly.

Using search:  "salesforce as sis site:.edu"   Google

And also: "salesforce as sis canvas site:.edu" Google

Happy fishing!

[Stef_retired]

Hi,  @ted_curran ​, we haven't heard from you since you posted your original question back in September. Did the responses you've received so far help, and have you made progress? Please take a moment to post an update.

[ted_curran]

Hi All--

These comments were helpful, yes, thanks. We've been working with our internal SalesForce team and it looks like we're going to be able to handle our main tasks using that system as our SIS. Right now it's at the planning stage, but I'll be sure to let people know when we get in and can assess how well it's helping us meet our top tasks.
Thanks!
Ted

[Robbie_Grant · Accepted solution]

 @ted_curran ,

We will go ahead and mark this as answered. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie

[ted_curran]

Sounds great, Robbie, thanks! We're about to configure and test our solution, so I'll do a writeup once we've lived with it for a while. 

[Robbie_Grant]

 @ted_curran ,

Perfect. I am sure the community would be very interested in your writeup!

Robbie

[kunal_ashar]

Has anyone heard of, or encountered a possible solution to this problem? We've Salesforce as our CRM, and I have been looking for a SSO solution that allows students to log into Salesforce and Canvas using the same credentials, and view a student's comprehensive information from both sources - Salesforce and Canvas.
Thanks in advance.

[nick_pagnani]

Adding my hat into the ring on this one. We have used SF as a CRM for the past few years and when we moved to Canvas we lost the connection that we had been enjoying. I would be interested in a solution to pipe data from Canvas into SF.

[nr2522]

Hello,  @nick_pagnani ‌.

Canvas has a robust API which allows you to pull most data that you are likely to need. Canvas LMS REST API Documentation. The tools and programming languages you use are up to you.

Best,

Nelson

[nick_pagnani]

Thanks for the note Nelson, I am new to Canvas as an admin and my skills are limited. I am starting to read some of the documentation, but it's above my paygrade. I will reach out to our implementation partner and see where we can go. I'd love to see how others are using SF as an SIS/CRM with Canvas to get some ideas for our use case.