Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Specifically speaking, SchoolSpeak is best used and only really utilized in education. From K-12 it serves a great purpose in terms of parent interaction and direct communication with parents about child performance, attendance, and scores in school. At younger ages, I think it will be even more appropriate for it to be used to create strictly parent platforms for helping them enroll in things they can do at home for their kids, teach their own children, and monitor their own children—especially if they are stay-at-home parents, homeschooling, or the children are not enrolled in school yet. I think a great idea would be creating a parent portal for newborns with daily activities to do from birth through age three, when they may go to pre-school. This is the only additional option I think that SchoolSpeak could serve.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review One thing it does well is one of the tools it incorporation, volunteer forms. These forms work for parents, teachers, and students. One of the hardest things to do is to get confirmation sign-ups and support. This streamlines the process of organizing events. The gradebook interface is easy to use and understand. In order to take attendance, complete grades and give assignments, SchoolSpeak actually is an easy platform to learn and is smoothly integrated. Archiving of past classes is easy to do and important because schools need to retain records for a long time after students have moved on. The platform lets you organize students and find them quickly by graduation. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review It can definitely have room for improvement in the design and template options. Using a more appealing layout like WIX or WEEBLY offer, but integrating the school speak platform into it would be a wonderful layout and great functionality. I would love to see social media integration. For business courses and media courses, there should be the ability to have social platforms connect directly and load within ShcoolSpeak. Social Media is the newest marketing strategy and it is left out of functionality here. Custom font downloads would make the design much easier and more attractive. The fonts they allow you to use are basic and overly common. Read full review Usability It was really so easy to sign up and get going with the whole process
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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
Read full review Moodle Rooms is a free platform but involves the need to be computer savvy. It is easy to use as well as SchoolSpeak. However, SchoolSpeak does have a direct communication platform with parents something that Moodle does not currently offer. This itself is a huge competitive advantage. The comparison then becomes, would you like to do less work but purchase SchoolSpeak, or do more work using multiple platforms but they are free. The SchoolSpeak platform does offer much more for the investment. Longer term and with full school integration, the investment is worth it. If you were to mandate using a platform, it should be SchoolSpeak because there are fewer risks associated with having to coach and education teachers, and less risk of complaints.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Positively speaking, it has a positive ROI. Although expensive, the platform does solve issues that we as educators have in giving parents daily information about their child in school. It is difficult to email all parents or call all parents, but a one-click platform really saves time and is worth the investment. Negatively, there is a cost associated, and therefore, sometimes teachers can be given more work instead of buying a platform like this. Using other free tools could be more time consuming but cheaper. Using School Speak we have seen parent involvement increase. Read full review ScreenShots Salesforce.org Education Cloud Screenshots