RedShelf vs. Salesforce.org Education Cloud

RedShelf has been great in a higher ed environment to help connect students to textbook and publisher materials. It has helped make the process of purchasing/accessing those materials so much easier for students. I am at an institution now where we don't have RedShelf, and the faculty and students are regularly frustrated with this process, so I'll be looking to get us a license here soon. RedShelf is particularly useful if instructors are using various different types of materials from different publishers. However, if an institution was only using Cengage Unlimited for example (that is a service where students will just pay for access to that site and all the books/materials for all of their courses would be accessible on there), that would be a time where I would think RedShelf wouldn't provide you with as much benefit. That being said, we may be using RedShelf in a very specific manner, and it may be able to provide us more ability/features that we haven't taken full advantage of.

Incentivized

It is most suited for those within the education industry. For students and staff in particular, the Education Cloud allows seamless connectivity between each person and helps students stay on task. It can be very overwhelming as a student to have so many responsibilities in different areas, so Salesforce does a great job of offering many features that ease this process.

Incentivized

• Provides access with or without internet connection to read your books.
• You can access the application from your mobile device, tablets, or desktop computers.
• Streamlines the distribution of e-books, e-textbooks, and other digital content.

Incentivized

• Great use of integrating across all aspects of enrollment.
• Easy to create tasks for counselors to remember to call prospective students and keep up to date on goals.
• Reporting is fabulous inside of Salesforce.
• All of the Apps in the App Exchange.

Incentivized

• Waiting for a course management tool to streamline the process. It's in the works and a tall order since all clients approach the process differently.
• A little bit of a stumble with a recent software rollout for day one access roll out, but at least it was intuitive to work through

Incentivized

• It’s hard to run reports or create working “views” for Enrollment/Student Advisor teams that include both Leads and Contacts in the same report.
• Some fields do not map from Lead to Contact object. When a student transitions from application to acceptance, some dropdown and fill-in fields completely disappear from the student’s page in Salesforce. Every version of Salesforce I’ve used has this problem.
• Salesforce overall is clunky and confusing for the average user. We require thorough Salesforce training for new hires on all teams because it’s not user-friendly or obvious what to click on to achieve a specific task.

Incentivized

It was really so easy to sign up and get going with the whole process

Incentivized

People will respond on time even though Salesforce is such a large organization. This also includes various methods of getting support beyond just calling - they have dedicated reps, chat, chatter, etc that all make the experience more pleasant.

Incentivized

I don't believe I'd used many products that are similar to RedShelf.

Incentivized

I have not used similar products and I am new to this role. Salesforce has been very easy to learn and I appreciate the support and ability to access the platform when I need to. I was able to easily learn the program and become skilled in what I needed to do. It also made the transition to digital forms quite easy

Incentivized

• It is a great provider of affordable digital learning materials that help improve teaching and learning through technology.

Incentivized

• Positive: Our entire company is more aligned because while still complying with FERPA, the right people have access to student records while also having the correct permissions.
• Positive: we can integrate with our partners who also use Salesforce, while still complying with FERPA.
• Negative: we've needed to hire a Salesforce Development team with multiple people to accurately customize the tool to work for us.

Incentivized