What is HEDA?

Salesforce.com announced the launch of HEDA (Higher Education Data Architecture) on March 1st 2016. HEDA is designed as the core data architecture to manage a diverse range of use cases catering to a student’s journey and providing educational institutions the entire necessary data component to manage their students, collaborate and cultivate an engaged student experience.

The Key values of HEDA as stated in their requirement specifications –

1. Exclusively focused on Core and Common relationship data across student lifecycle.
2. Open and Flexible? to accommodate a range of use cases and end user customization.
3. Common Acceptance b?y the Higher Ed customer and vendor ecosystem.

With HEDA, institutions of all sizes can:

• Build the foundation for the connected campus:  Quickly configure Salesforce to manage students throughout their university journey—from prospect to student to alumni.
• Get started faster than ever:  Accelerate deployment of Salesforce by using objects and functionality created specifically for Higher Ed.
• Improve the student experience:  Break down silos by creating 360-degree views of every student, developing the foundation for personalized communications across students’ academic journeys and beyond.
• Join a community of innovators:  Leverage the open-source, community-driven data architecture to collaborate on some of the Higher Ed industry’s greatest technology challenges on the Salesforce.org Power of Us Hub.

 

Common Link between NPSP and HEDA

Prior to launch of HEDA, there were no apps or in built data architecture from Salesforce.com which completely focussed on Higher Ed unlike Nonprofits. Nonprofits is a more matured domain in the salesforce arena than Higher Ed. Salesforce has a number of apps which are completely focussed for Nonprofits and Higher Ed were able to leverage some of the apps like –

1. Affiliations
2. Relationships

HEDA now comes in built with these features and also optional structure to support Household.

 

The HEDA Architecture

The below diagram explains the HEDA architecture.

 

The following table illustrates the various objects in the HEDA data architecture and their usage –

Here is the detailed link to HEDA documentation: http://developer.salesforce.org/HEDAP/ApexDocumentation/

HEDA open source code base in github: https://github.com/SalesforceFoundation/HEDAP

 

How to install HEDA?

The Higher Ed org from Salesforce does not come pre-installed with HEDA. However, HEDA is free of cost and can be directly installed from AppExchange.

https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a0N3000000DpaNuEAJ

 

References

• https://powerofus.force.com/servlet/fileField?retURL=%2Farticles%2FResource%2FHigher-Education-Data-Architecture-HEDA-Software-Requirements-Specification&entityId=ka080000000DdNUAA0&field=File__Body__s
• http://www.salesforce.org/highered/data-architecture/heda-press-release/
• http://developer.salesforce.org/HEDAP/ApexDocumentation/