The further education sector is under more pressure than ever. Rising employer expectations, complex apprenticeship frameworks, ESFA compliance requirements, and the ongoing challenge of demonstrating learner outcomes are stretching already-stretched teams. And for many FE colleges, the systems supposed to help – legacy MIS platforms, spreadsheets, disconnected CRMs – are making things harder, not easier. 

Salesforce Education Cloud offers a different approach. Built to manage the full learner lifecycle on a single, unified platform, it’s increasingly being adopted by FE colleges that need to manage not just students, but the employers, programmes, and outcomes that sit around them. 

In this blog, we explore how Salesforce Education Cloud addresses two of the biggest operational challenges in FE: employer engagement and apprenticeship management. 

The FE Challenge: It’s Not Just About Students 

Higher education institutions tend to think in terms of the student journey – from enquiry to enrolment to graduation. Further education is more complex than that. 

FE colleges operate more like B2B training organisations. Students are often employer-sponsored. Programmes run on accelerated timelines.  And critically, every apprenticeship involves a three-way relationship between the learner, the employer, and the institution – a relationship that most legacy MIS systems simply weren’t designed to handle. 

The result? Employer data lives in one place, learner data in another, and compliance reporting pulls from yet another. Staff are logging into multiple systems, manually reconciling information, and spending time on administration that should be spent on outcomes.

Employer Engagement: From Spreadsheet to Strategic Asset 

Salesforce Education Cloud treats employers the way they should be treated – as strategic partners, not just contacts in a spreadsheet. 

Using the Education platform, each employer becomes an Account in Salesforce, with full relationship history, affiliated learners, contract terms, and engagement activity all visible in one place. Custom fields allow colleges to track volume commitments, payment schedules, and levy arrangements. And because it’s built on the world’s leading CRM, that employer relationship doesn’t disappear when a member of staff leaves – the institutional knowledge stays. 

Key employer engagement capabilities include: 

Unified partnership management – corporate partnerships, work placements, and apprenticeship agreements all managed in one system, connected directly to learner outcomes 

Historical relationship context – career services teams can reference previous employer engagement when reaching out about new programmes or cohorts, strengthening long-term relationships 

Student-to-employer matching – learners build profiles with skills, interests, and career goals; the platform surfaces relevant employer opportunities and sends automated notifications 

Outcome tracking – placement data links back to academic programmes, giving colleges insight into which programmes lead to successful employment outcomes – data that directly informs curriculum development and marketing 

For colleges with T-Level industry placements or levy-funded programmes, this level of employer visibility isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s essential. 

Apprenticeship Management: One Platform for a Three-Way Relationship

Apprenticeships are, by design, complex. The learner is studying. The employer is funding and hosting. The college is delivering and evidencing. Managing this across disconnected systems creates risk – missed milestones, delayed payments, compliance gaps, and frustrated employers. 

Salesforce Education Cloud is built to hold all three sides of this relationship in a single, connected view. 

Each apprentice is linked to their employer Account via Salesforce’s Affiliation model. Progress, attendance, certification attempts, and compliance milestones are all tracked against the learner record. Automated alerts flag when a learner is falling behind, giving tutors and assessors time to intervene before it becomes a funding issue. 

Key apprenticeship management capabilities include: 

Certification and credential tracking – custom objects map learners to specific apprenticeship standards, track assessment attempts, and trigger automated reminders ahead of End-Point Assessments. 

Compliance and ESFA reporting – Education Cloud captures employment status, programme completion, and outcome data in formats required for government funding and accreditation reports. 

Automated workflows – progress reviews, review sign-offs, and milestone communications can all be automated, reducing the administrative burden on delivery teams. 

Employer portal access – using Salesforce Experience Cloud alongside Education Cloud, employers can be given controlled access to their sponsored learners’ progress, improving transparency and strengthening the college-employer relationship. 

For colleges managing hundreds or thousands of apprentices across multiple employers and standards, the operational efficiency gains are significant.

The ESFA Compliance Piece 

One of the most time-consuming aspects of apprenticeship delivery is evidencing outcomes for ESFA reporting. Colleges need to demonstrate programme completion rates, employment outcomes, and learner progress – often pulling data from multiple sources and reformatting it for submission. 

Education Cloud centralises this data from the outset. Custom reports generate ESFA-compliant outputs directly from learner and employer records, eliminating the end-of-term scramble and reducing the risk of errors that can impact funding. 

Why Now? 

The FE sector is at an inflection point. The growth of T-Levels, the expansion of degree apprenticeships, and increasing employer expectations around transparency and outcomes are driving colleges to rethink their systems infrastructure. 

At the same time, Agentforce – Salesforce’s AI layer – is opening up new possibilities for FE teams. AI agents can handle routine learner enquiries 24/7, flag at-risk learners before they disengage, and help employer relationship managers prioritise their outreach. For lean FE teams being asked to do more with less, this matters. 

How NimbusPoint Can Help 

At NimbusPoint, we work with further and higher education institutions to design and deliver Salesforce implementations that fit the way they actually work – not generic out-of-the-box deployments. 

We understand the FE operating model: the employer relationships, the apprenticeship complexity, the ESFA obligations, and the legacy MIS constraints that most colleges are working around. We build Salesforce solutions that sit alongside your existing systems and make them work better, not replace them overnight. 

If you’re exploring how Salesforce could transform your employer engagement or apprenticeship management, we’d love to talk. 

Get in touch with Pam our Business Development Director, to arrange a conversation or a demo tailored to your college’s needs.

On May 26, we brought a room of senior enterprise leaders together at Toronto Tech Week for something they promised upfront would not be a product pitch or a technical deep dive.

It was a full day: 90 minutes in the morning, a leadership lunch, and 90 minutes in the afternoon, all built around one goal. Give executives the clarity and the frameworks to lead the AI conversation in their own organisations, starting Monday morning. The day was led by Johnny Than, CEO and Co-Founder of both Appficiency and AskCipher, with over 30 years of enterprise IT experience and more than 1,000 client engagements.

This is a recap of what happened, what was said, and what the room took home.

Enterprise AI Is a Cultural Shift, Not Just a Technology Problem

Johnny opened the morning by drawing a line most executives hadn’t considered: the organisations that survive major technological shifts are rarely the ones that resist them. They are the ones who adapt to how culture changes around the technology.

He walked through the room through a series of historical parallels. Scribes to the printing press. Encyclopedias to Wikipedia. CDs to Spotify. Taxis to Uber. Each disruption followed the same pattern: the technology arrived, created fear and resistance, and then quietly became the new normal.

The question for enterprise leaders isn’t whether AI represents that kind of shift. It does. The question is how to lead through it intentionally rather than reactively.

AI-native organisations are already moving faster because they aren’t locked into rigid approval processes and legacy software workflows. For enterprises, the goal isn’t to chase speed. It’s about redesigning work around the availability of intelligence everywhere, not just automating what already exists.

Why Enterprise AI Keeps Stalling: The Three Faces of GenAI Friction

To make the challenge concrete, Johnny walked the room through one of the most universal enterprise workflows: hiring a great employee.

The exercise covered the full hiring process, from job description creation to resume screening, interview scheduling, interview evaluation, and final candidate selection. At each stage, a different kind of friction surfaced.

Technical Friction

A generic LLM can draft a job description, but it lacks organisational context. It doesn’t know your competency frameworks, your compensation bands, or what “senior operations” actually means at your company. The output may sound polished, but it doesn’t align with how your organisation actually hires, which creates a second review process that slows everything down.

Human Friction

In-app agents can screen hundreds of resumes automatically, ranking candidates by experience, certifications, and keywords. The problem: recruiters don’t trust the output. Hiring managers override recommendations based on instinct. Employees worry about bias. The AI does the work, and humans redo it anyway.

Organisational Friction

AI scheduling tools will book your interview in the first available calendar slot. Nobody wants that. Add multiple panellists, competing priorities, and an urgent posting, and the AI creates more coordination overhead than it removes.

By the time you reach final candidate selection, all three friction types have compounded. The organisation is using AI everywhere in the process and trusting it almost nowhere.

This, Johnny argued, is the real reason most organisations aren’t seeing return on their AI investments. The technology is working. The friction is the problem.

Bite Small Chew Fast: The Enterprise AI Framework That Actually Works

The framework that anchored the entire day came from a simple internal mantra we’ve adopted: bite small, chew fast.

Most organisations read the headlines and decide their first AI initiative should be transformational. They want to solve a £50 million problem with AI. The consistent pattern across enterprise AI deployments is that this approach fails.

The better entry point is to solve a five-hour problem with twenty minutes of AI. That’s how you build confidence, demonstrate value, and create the organisational buy-in that makes larger AI investments possible.

This isn’t a ceiling. There are million-dollar problems that have been solved with a fifty-dollar AI subscription. But attempting that first, before the organisation has developed AI literacy, governance, or trust, leads to exactly the friction described above.

The principle maps to Appficiency’s Solution Levelling Framework, where complexity is measured across five levels, from basic inspection and monitoring at Levels 1 and 2, through targeted automation at Level 3, and into full production-grade automation at Levels 4 and 5. Levels 1 through 3 resolve the majority of business needs. The effort required to reach Level 5 is roughly 25 times greater than Level 1.

Start simple. Prove it works. Escalate complexity only when data justifies it. That’s what bite small chew fast means in practice.

What Real Enterprise AI Success Looks Like

The panel brought three distinct perspectives on what bite small, chew fast looks like in production.

Alex Miles, Partner at 180 Systems, described how AI helped a client achieve an ERP go-live in under two months, a timeline previously considered impossible, by using AI to automate the data migration mapping process and generate report code from existing templates. Two contained interventions. One compressed timeline.

“New companies we’re working with want to get to value much faster,” Alex noted. “If you start with a single process and gain some confidence, the team can trust the system and build on that.”

Shayan Rastgou, Co-Founder of AskCipher, shared that Appficiency’s 200 to 300 daily AskCipher users fall into three use case categories: consultants using it to accelerate ERP implementations, developers using it for code guidance, and employees using it for communication and external-facing tasks. The third category is consistently the most complex, because it requires the kind of institutional context and judgment that AI models don’t naturally carry.

“If we take the time to provide AI with the right context and help humans understand how to interact with it, the implementation becomes a lot less friction-heavy,” Shayan said.

Gareth Doherty, PhD, from Think/able Solutions, offered a more grounded perspective on where most organisations actually are: the organic co-piloting stage. Everyone has access to a large language model. Most are figuring out how to use it. Very few are driving disciplined, measurable enterprise AI value from it yet.

“Adoption means learning as you grow,” Gareth said. “If you’re going to start small, start with your strongest teams. They know their processes better and will give you the most useful signal.”

The Conversations That Mattered: Key Q&A Insights

The Q&A after the panel was where the session found its sharpest edges. The room pushed back, shared real scenarios, and surfaced some of the most practically useful insights of the day.

Reliability Is the Hardest Thing to Prove in Enterprise AI

When asked what is most difficult to establish in an enterprise AI implementation, the panel aligned around one answer: reliability. With a trained employee, once certified, you can trust the output. AI is probabilistic. Even well-defined deployments carry inherent risk, and in enterprise contexts where invoices, compliance records, and financial transactions are involved, that risk is not theoretical.

Building reliability in enterprise AI requires starting small, measuring rigorously, and extending trust incrementally, not deploying broadly and hoping for the best.

Change Management Is Non-Negotiable

An audience member described a company that deployed AI-assisted sales coaching tools and triggered a team revolt. After two months of resistance, the company explained the purpose clearly: not surveillance, but coaching. Not replacement, but enablement. Performance improved significantly once the team understood the intent.

The panel treated this as a textbook case. Communication and transparency are not soft considerations in an enterprise AI deployment. They are structural requirements. Gareth pointed to DBS Bank in Singapore as a leading example, where its AI ethical framework centers on two factors: explainability and respectability.

“Open communication and transparency are key,” Gareth noted. “If people can see and understand how AI adoption will impact them, you can reduce resistance significantly.”

Enterprise AI Amplifies What’s Already There

One of the more candid exchanges surfaced a hard truth: AI tends to amplify low performers more than high performers. A high-performing employee gets incrementally better. A low-performing employee gets a tool that scales their output, including their mistakes. In organisations that deploy AI broadly without governance or guardrails, problems don’t continue at the same rate. They accelerate.

The panel’s consistent answer: start with your strongest teams. Pilot with engaged people who know their processes. Learn from that foundation before expanding.

Making the ROI Case for Enterprise AI Without Perfect Data

An audience member asked directly how to justify AI investment internally when the ROI data is still limited. The honest answer from the panel was that this is a real constraint in 2026, not a perception problem. The data infrastructure to measure enterprise AI ROI at scale doesn’t yet exist in most organisations.

The practical path forward is to anchor your AI initiative to a business process that already has performance metrics. If you can measure the baseline, you can measure the improvement. Government grant programs, including the Ontario Centre of Innovation and ADC’s Lift program, are also available to support organisations at the evaluation stage.

Build vs. Buy in Enterprise AI: Context Wins

The question of whether to build AI tooling internally or purchase it came up toward the end of the session. The panel reframed it entirely: the differentiator in enterprise AI isn’t whether you can build the capability. Anyone can build an LLM-based system that calls tools and holds a conversation. The differentiator is the knowledge and context encoded into that system over time, the field mappings, the workflow logic, the organisational rules, and the edge cases discovered through hundreds of real deployments. That takes years to accumulate.

The Most Important Skill for Enterprise AI Right Now

When asked what individuals and organisations should be developing, the panel pointed to something most people didn’t expect: communication.

“The biggest element of getting what we want out of AI is how well we communicate with it,” Shayan said. “The same problem, communicated differently, produces a completely different result.”

As general knowledge becomes increasingly commoditised through AI models, the ability to communicate precisely and translate organisational context into effective inputs becomes a meaningful competitive advantage. The best prompts don’t come from the most technical people in the room. They come from the people who best understand the work.

A Look at the Afternoon: Your Best Enterprise AI Strategy Has No UI

The afternoon session took a different angle, focused on where enterprise AI is heading rather than where it is today.

Johnny argued that the traditional enterprise interface, the menus, screens, dashboards, and click paths that define how most business software operates, is becoming the primary barrier to enterprise AI adoption rather than its enabler. The most powerful AI strategies don’t add a better interface. They remove the need for one. Context replaces navigation. One sentence replaces dozens of clicks.

AskCipher was demonstrated live as an example: a single AI layer that sits above an organisation’s entire connected application stack, executes multi-step workflows across systems, enforces organisational rules and permissions, and operates without requiring the user to know where anything lives in the underlying software.

Five Enterprise AI Principles to Take Back to Your Organisation

The day closed with five principles presented not as aspirational goals but as architectural requirements for enterprise AI done right.

1. Your data stays yours. AI should never own or store your data. Every action happens within your existing stack.
2. It’s a layer, not a feature. Enterprise AI isn’t an add-on to one application. It’s a universal interface across your entire stack.
3. It enhances, it doesn’t replace. AI works within the capabilities of your existing systems. The systems stay. The experience changes entirely.
4. Permissions are sacred. AI should only do what the authenticated user is permitted to do. No escalation. No workarounds. Full audit trail.
5. One perfect action beats ten messy ones. Precision matters more than speed. Confirm before acting. Prioritise quality of outcome over volume of output.

Frequently Asked Questions About Enterprise AI

What does “Bite Small Chew Fast” mean in enterprise AI strategy?

Bite Small Chew Fast is the principle that enterprise AI adoption should start with contained, high-impact use cases rather than large transformational initiatives. The goal is to solve a five-hour problem with twenty minutes of AI, demonstrate real value, build organisational confidence, and scale from there. Attempting to solve complex, enterprise-wide problems before the foundation is in place is one of the most consistent patterns behind enterprise AI deployments that stall.

What is GenAI friction, and why does it matter for enterprise AI ROI?

GenAI friction is the resistance that slows or stops enterprise AI adoption. It comes in three forms: technical friction, where AI tools lack organisational context and produce outputs that don’t align with real operations; human friction, where employees don’t trust AI outputs and revert to manual processes; and organisational friction, where gaps in governance, policy, and cross-departmental coordination prevent AI from scaling. Identifying which type is most present in your organisation is the first step toward addressing it and unlocking real AI ROI.

How is a context-driven AI layer different from tools like ChatGPT or in-app enterprise AI agents?

Generic AI tools operate on public knowledge and have no memory of your organisation, your workflows, or your previous interactions. In-app agents are limited to a single application and typically don’t enforce organisational permissions. A context-driven AI layer operates above your entire connected application stack, executes multi-step workflows across systems, retains organisational context across sessions, and enforces each user’s existing permissions. The difference isn’t capability. It’s context.

How do you make an ROI case for enterprise AI when the data is still limited?

The most practical approach is to anchor your AI initiative to a business process that already has performance metrics. If you can measure baseline performance, you can measure AI’s impact. Starting with one contained process also reduces the governance and change management complexity that makes broader enterprise AI deployments harder to justify. Government programs, including the Ontario Centre of Innovation and ADC’s Lift program, are also available to support organisations at the evaluation stage.

The Advantage Won’t Come from Moving Faster

The consistent thread across every session, every panel exchange, and every audience question was the same.

Speed is not the competitive advantage in enterprise AI. Intentionality is. One well-designed AI deployment, built on clean data, governed permissions, and a clear process foundation, creates more durable value than ten rushed experiments.

As Johnny put it to close the day: “The advantage won’t come from adopting AI faster. It will come from applying it more intentionally than everyone else.”

Bite small. Chew fast. Build something that actually lasts.

To explore how Appficiency, AskCipher, NimbusPoint and SnapOn Software can help your organisation move from AI experimentation to real operational impact, book a strategy call with our team today.

Since our founding, NimbusPoint has grown into one of the most respected Salesforce consulting firms in the UK and North America. With 5 star CSAT status, Select Partner standing, and deep expertise in education and healthcare, we’ve built something we’re incredibly proud of.

Now, we’re taking the next step.

NimbusPoint is now part of the Appficiency group of companies, a global IT consulting firm and software business delivering enterprise digital transformation services across ERP, CRM, and Productivity Platforms.

Why We’re Excited

Our clients have always needed more connected systems. They need their CRM connected to their ERP. They need their financial systems talking to their sales operations. They need consultants who understand their industry, not just a platform.

By joining Appficiency, we can now deliver exactly that.

Appficiency has spent over a decade building world-class expertise in construction, transportation and logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, and education, the same industries where NimbusPoint has its strongest client relationships. They were Oracle NetSuite’s Canadian Alliance Partner of the Year in 2025, they’ve delivered 785+ projects with a 98% go-live rate, and their team includes some of the most experienced ERP consultants in the business.

Together, we’re combining NimbusPoint’s Salesforce mastery with Appficiency’s deep industry knowledge and ERP expertise to serve our clients’ entire technology stack.

What This Means for NimbusPoint Clients

Nothing changes about who we are. The same team. The same quality. The same commitment to your success.

What changes is what we can offer you:

• ERP + CRM alignment: Your CRM and ERP environments designed, implemented, and managed by one group that understands how they connect
• Industry-specific solutions: Consultants with vertical expertise in your industry, not generalists learning your business on the job
• Broader technology coverage:  Access to Microsoft 365 governance and security solutions through SnapOn Software, Appficiency’s proprietary software division
• Global scale: Combined operations across North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Asia Pacific with over 200 employees
• Proprietary innovation: Including our AdmissionSync platform for education and Appficiency’s enterprise AI solution, AskCipher

Looking Ahead

We founded NimbusPoint because we believed Salesforce consulting should be personal, expert, and transformative. That belief hasn’t changed. But the opportunity in front of us has grown.

The companies we serve are tired of juggling five different consulting firms that don’t talk to each other. They want one partner who understands their industry and can deliver across their full tech stack. That’s what the Appficiency group now offers, and NimbusPoint is at the heart of it.

Same NimbusPoint. Bigger platform. Better outcomes for you.

To learn more about our expanded capabilities, contact us or reach out to your existing NimbusPoint team.

Follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates on what we’re up to. 

2025 was a landmark year for NimbusPoint. Following our acquisition by Capficiency in August 2024, our first full calendar year as part of the organisation delivered exceptional growth opportunities and global expansion that exceeded our expectations. 

Here are just a few of the key highlights we are proud of in 2025. 

Growth in Egypt 

Our ever-growing team of expert consultants has now expanded into Egypt, increasing our global expertise, but keeping the local partnership. No longer limited by local talent pools means we can offer our clients a more flexible, global delivery approach. Senior consultants who know your business, paired with specialised technical teams that deliver results efficiently.  

125 Projects in 2025

It’s been a whirlwind year for our consultants, 125 projects in 12 months is a record for us! This incredible milestone wouldn’t have been possible without our dedicated consultants, whose expertise, hard work, and passion drove exceptional results across every engagement. The proof is in the numbers: our customers consistently rated their experiences with 4 and 5-star CSAT scores, a testament to the quality and care our team brings to every project. The projects spanned Education, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Nonprofits, Manufacturing, and Professional Services, in the UK, North America and Europe.

Specific Education Expertise

2025 saw us cementing our footing within the world of Education. Establishing ourselves as specialists after heavy investment, not only in offerings and services with the launch of our bespoke UCAS integration, AdmissionSync, but also with the recruitment of a dedicated Education specialist. Josie Stratford has decades of experience working in Higher and Further Education, her knowledge has given us a clear insight into the pain points Education organisations have to contend with on a day to day basis, and has given us a clear vision of how we can help the Education sector remove these pain points. 2026 will see us grow this even more with a tailored offering designed specifically for the Education in the UK and Europe and continue to expand our education expertise into North America, so watch this space for exciting things to come.  

Expansion into North America

While our North American expansion began in 2024, 2025 brought new service offerings and significant growth in the Healthcare and Life Sciences sector. We now offer a QuickStart package for North America designed to launch Salesforce fast, but crucially, keep it bespoke for every industry and every business. Our office in Toronto serves as the thriving central hub for US and Canadian clients and the Salesforce ecosystem, making building relationships and continental expansion seamless.  

Prioritising Connection and Celebration

2025 brought a variety of events both hosted by NimbusPoint and Salesforce, across the UK, Europe and North America. We prioritised connection and celebration through a variety of events – from team-specific gatherings and dinners to our unforgettable Haunted House Halloween event. We hosted engaging Lunch and Learns, sponsored organisation-wide events, and enjoying happy hour with AEs from various Salesforce teams. Our team also represented NimbusPoint at industry events including a sponsored golf tournament, the Agentforce World Tour in Toronto, and Salesforce’s exclusive Yachtforce customer appreciation event. It’s been a year of growth, learning and building stronger relationships.  

None of this would have been possible without our talented consultants and loyal customers here’s to continuing this journey together. 

Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates on what we’re up to. 

We’ve had an amazing 2023 at NimbusPoint, full of new exciting projects, team away days, internal promotions, 5-star reviews and new integrations. Here are a few highlights from our most successful year to date. 

66 New Projects 

There’s been no rest for our consultants this year with 66 new projects starting, as well as the existing projects from 2022. After heavy investment in 2022, we delivered into a wide range of industries including manufacturing, nonprofits, telecommunications, media, retail and education. 

62 Professional Services Engagements

As well as new projects we’ve helped a variety of our customers with support. Support projects ranged from 6-12 months, showing how valuable our experience really is.  

27 New Customers

As well as helping returning customers we’re delighted to work with 27 new customers in 2023. These have mainly come from the education sector, an area we are truly experts in. Other industries included manufacturing, telecommunications, retail and nonprofits. 

42 Completed Projects

Our projects range in length from 2–18-months across many Salesforce Products.  Every project is different, and every project uses a different level of expertise from our consultants. We celebrate every completed project as a team – 2023 saw us complete more projects than ever before so it felt like the mini celebrations were never ending. Check out our success stories to read all about a few of the completed projects. 

94 Salesforce Demonstrations

Our Business Development Team have been non–stop this year, up and down the country showing the magic of Salesforce to a variety of customers. We’ve built Salesforce demo orgs across multiple business and respective needs, and love to show them off, 94 demos in 2023 averages nearly 2 a week!  

Customer Satisfaction Score of 4.84 out of 5 

We’ve always prided ourselves on our great customer service, shown in the amazing customer reviews we receive. Throughout 2023 our customer satisfaction score never dropped below 4.8 and we finished the year with 100% of our reviews 4-star and above, something we’re really proud of.  

UCAS Integration

2023 was an amazing year for our development team who successfully built an integration between Salesforce and UCAS giving the education sector a 360-degree view of the UCAS applicant on one platform. Everything from applicant details to personal statements is imported from UCAS allowing Salesforce to become a source of truth for UCAS applicants. This integration was specifically designed for one of our clients but watch this space we’ll be rolling it out further in 2024! 

Team Away Days

As a small but perfectly formed team we always make time to have fun together, whether it be a meal, drinks, an office quiz or one of our action–packed away days, we love to spend time together away from our desks and looking forward to more in 2024! 

 

Happy New Year to you all and a huge thank you to our team at NimbusPoint, our customers and Salesforce for helping us have a record year in 2023, 2024 is already looking to follow suit.  

 

Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates on what we’re up to. 

Introducing AdmissionSync – UCAS Integration for Salesforce

Simplify your admissions process with our seamless UCAS-Salesforce integration. Built by NimbusPoint’s expert developers and consultants, AdmissionSync enables UCAS applications to flow directly into Salesforce – eliminating manual data entry, reducing errors and improving efficiency.

 Our solution provides a near real-time integration creating applicants, applications, education history and address records, and imports the personal statement and references as files against each application.  

Key Features and Benefits 

With this bespoke UCAS-Salesforce integration you can view every student’s submitted UCAS application to your University in near real-time.  Once the student has made their 5 choices, and submitted through UCAS, the solution sends the application through to admissions to: 

• Review the applicant, applications and education history details. 
• Review information submitted to UCAS including students references and personal statements.  
• Creation of applicant communications throughout the applicant process. 
• Submit application decisions on Salesforce for the applicant to view on UCAS. 
• Prevent communication breaches whilst within the UCAS embargo period. 
• Ability to save complete student application as a .pdf document. 

User Case Study: Richmond American University London

AdmissionSync is helping institutions such as Richmond American University London, streamline admissions and improve oversight of UCAS application data.  “The UCAS-Salesforce integration has enabled Richmond to consolidate a siloed application process onto a single platform to provide a full 360-degree view of UCAS applicants; everything from applicant details to personal statements is imported from UCAS, allowing Salesforce to become the source of truth for Richmond’s UCAS applicants.” – Annabelle Normington, Salesforce Consultant 

To see a demonstration of the integration in action or to have an informal chat about how this could help your University, contact Pam Bharath on parminder.bharath@nimbuspoint.com 

Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates on what we’re up to. 

As we approach the halfway mark of 2023, we wanted to share some of our successes with you. We’ve had a great start to the year and we’re very proud of the growing NimbusPoint team and everything we’ve accomplished so far this year.  

37 New Projects 

Our consultants have certainly been kept busy so far this year with 37 new projects starting in just 6 months. These cover mainly education, manufacturing, finance, telecommunications and nonprofit sectors. We’ve also taken on a pro bono project as part of the pledge 1% program with Salesforce where you pledge 1% of your time to help charities, trusts and foundations. We’ve really enjoyed the variety of projects so far this year including building our own bespoke UCAS integration with Salesforce for Richmond University.  

17 New Customers 

We’re delighted to have 17 new customers working with us this year. These new customers have been from a variety of industries but primarily from the education and nonprofit sectors. Over the last few years, we’ve invested resource into these sectors and have dedicated teams for each industry, this means for every education and nonprofit project we have specialist, certified consultants who know the industry inside out, managing the project from start to finish. 

Customer Satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 

Feedback from our customers is really important to us. As a Salesforce partner, Salesforce gather feedback after a completed project and give us a score out of 5. This is a live score and changes for every review. Our score this year has been 4.97 based on the feedback we’ve received, showing how much our customers enjoy working with us and we’re pretty chuffed with that. 

25 New Support Agreements 

As part of every project our customers receive a month-long support period to ensure everything runs smoothly when the project goes live. So far in 2023 we’ve worked on 25 new support agreements on top of the ones included with the project, these have ranged from 6 to 12 months and generally are to help customers with automations, team training, email templates and creating reports and dashboards. 

20 Completed Projects 

Our projects can sometimes be short 4-month service agreements or 18-months to 2-year full implementations and support, so to have 20 completed so far in 2023 is something to celebrate for us.  

53 Salesforce Demonstrations 

Being a Salesforce partner means we’ve built a lot of different Salesforce orgs for a lot of different business needs, we use these to demonstrate how Salesforce can help our customers whatever their scenario. So far this year we’ve done 53 demonstrations to existing and potential new customers, that’s an average of 2 a week! These were across all industries including manufacturing, education, media, finance and telecommunications to name a few.  

Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates on what we’re up to. 

Salesforce have announced a new type of license that you can assign to users, the Salesforce Integration User License, and it’s available now. It’s specifically designed for system-to-system integrations as it only provides API access. Each org will have access to 5 of these licenses for free. Taking advantage of these free licenses means you can free up some of your existing licenses by migrating some users to the new license. This will make better use of your existing licenses by allocating them to employees within your team.  

The biggest advantage here is the cost, there isn’t one! The 5 licenses are available per org in the Performance, Enterprise and Unlimited editions. There’s also one included with every Developer Edition org. After the first 5 are used you can purchase extra licenses for $10 per user, per month, making it much cheaper than a full Salesforce license.  

How do I implement the new licenses? 

You can view all the licenses available to you in the company information in your org. Below is how to find and implement them in 5 easy steps.  

Step 1

Create a new user and assign the Integration User License and Integration profile. Alternatively, if you are using a license for an integration already you can update the license/profile but note that your integration will break until you have completed step 3.

Set the users email to an address you have access to so you can set the password.  

Step 2

Set the password. Note this is the last thing you’ll be able to do in the UI for this user.  

Step 3

Create a permission set to allow access to the relevant objects and fields. (You can also clone the profile if required but it might be more manageable to have 1 license and a permission set per integration). Assign the permission set.  

Step 4

Update integrations  

Step 5

Let management know how much money you’ve saved them and bask in the glow of their praise! 

Alternatively, if you’d like some guidance contact us and we can help ensure you’re making the most out of your current licenses. 

Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates on what we’re up to. 

We’ve had a fantastic year at NimbusPoint full of exciting projects, new team members, great customer reviews, even more certifications and a lot of laughs along the way. Here are some of our personal highlights of 2022.  

Becoming a Salesforce.org Partner 

2022 saw us officially become a Salesforce.org partner, specialising in education and the nonprofit sector. We’re so excited at what 2023 will bring for us in this area, especially when it comes to improving sustainability and supporting the 1% pledge.  

Certifications 

Last year our talented consultants were been passing exams left, right and center. From Sales Cloud to Nonprofit Cloud, the certifications  were rolling in all year. We couldn’t be prouder of what our team have achieved and how we’ve seen their expertise help our clients on a daily basis.  

Successful Projects 

2022 saw us work on the most diverse and exciting projects we’ve ever done before. Working with amazing clients from all industries including education, local government, nonprofit as well as media, telecommunications and finance. Our success stories highlight a few, but we’ve really enjoyed every minute of each one.  

AoC Annual Conference 

Last year saw us exhibit at a large conference for the first time. The AoC annual conference took place in Birmingham and it was a great success, we loved seeing existing customers and meeting new faces. We’re really looking forward to what 2023 brings for us in the education space.  

Amazing Team Away Days 

Our team away days have been a fabulous way for us all to let off some steam together. A mixture of team work, laughter and the most competitive battles ever witnessed in NimbusPoint history. 

 

Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates on what we’re up to.