MSU Recruiting and Admissions Runs on Salesforce
Michigan State University further-enhances their operations with an advanced strategy for Salesforce AppExchange applications. MSU seeks out applications that:
- Support agile operations
- Extend across multiple environments
- Provide value for large data volumes
- Give visibility into adoption components
- Have an easy-to-use interface and configuration
Michigan State University Was Experiencing Salesforce Data Protection and Sandbox Seeding Challenges
As they continued to grow their Salesforce Org, Michigan State University focused on solving three data protection challenges. First, Michigan State University was backing up their Salesforce data with the Weekly Export, but found the processing time had become too lengthy. They also couldn’t back up metadata or maintain parent/child relationships during a data recovery. The second challenge MSU’s CRM management team had was to ensure they would be able to recover from a data loss and corruption incident. The team ended up deciding to seek out another faster, more comprehensive backup and recovery method than the Salesforce Weekly Export. Finally, Michigan State University was experiencing numerous challenges with a slow, manual sandbox replication processes. MSU develops a significant amount of custom code across their Salesforce platform, which makes speedy sandbox replication critical to their operations.
On a mission to protect their institutional data and speed up their development operations, Michigan State University sought out a comprehensive data backup and recovery solution.
Michigan State University Raises the Bar on Salesforce Data Protection and Sandbox Seeding
After a thorough proof of concept, Michigan State University felt confident in choosing Own as their backup and recovery vendor. After connecting Own to their Salesforce Org, MSU was running their first backup within minutes. The Own interface helps Michigan State University easily identify data loss or corruption using visual graphs as well as data and metadata compare. During day-to-day operations and transformative projects, MSU leverages Smart Alerts to ensure no unexpected data changes go unnoticed. Smart Alerts also alert MSU’s CRM team to data and metadata changes before their end users notice.
Before deployment to production or a sandbox, Michigan State University uses the Compare feature in Own Recover identify if any new validation rules exist to avoid deployment failures. Furthermore, Michigan State University now has the support of Own Accelerate to populate anonymized test data in minutes, speeding up development cycles significantly. Accelerate has reduced MSU’s replication times from almost a day to less than an hour.
Michigan State University’s CRM Team Saves the Day with Own
Own helped Michigan State University recover from an accidental data corruption shortly after their partnership began. An ID field on their Accounts had a varying numbers of leading zeroes.
"Own Accelerate has reduced Michigan State University’s replication times from almost a day to less than an hour."
These leading zeros were accidentally removed by Excel automation while the file was being prepared. The leading zeros on several account IDs were then removed during a data load. Using Own’s visual graphs, they were able to locate the date the change took place. Then, using the Compare feature in Own Recover, they looked at the day before and after the change to locate the corrupted data. Finally, they used Own to restore just the corrupted data.
Own has clearly proven to be more than just a backup tool for Michigan State University. For example, Michigan State University’s internal policy does not allow them to restore fields that aren’t tracked in their own Salesforce Field History Tracking. Therefore, they use Own’s daily backups and Compare capability to perform their history tracking. Audit logs, including fields, are already backed up with Own. In fact, Own offers MSU unlimited storage for all of their data, metadata, and attachments. Own helps MSU keep track of all the changes made to a field of an individual record.
With Own, Michigan State University continues to accelerate their growth and build resiliency with data protection peace of mind.
