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Steven MSteven M 

Visualisation of student planning

Hello,
 
We are a language school and we manage all our clients and enrolments with Salesforce. We capture in Salesforce the start date of a student, the end date of the course, the centre where (s)he is studying and the level.
 
Today, we use a simple Excel spreadsheet to show the length of stay of a certain student. A color code indicated the type of course the student is taking so the x axis shows the weeks (starting every Monday) and the y axis lists the students.
 
We want to get rid of the spreadsheet and be able to show the same sort of graphic driven by the data in Salesforce. If you think this is possible, let me know, it would be a huge improvement on our data integrity and quality.
 
Kind regards
 
Steven Muller
Ensemble CRMEnsemble CRM
definitely doable
 
contact us to let us show you how easy it would be.
 
 
 
AnkitShethAnkitSheth
Its feasible and can be done with ease.
Reply back with your contact details so that we can take this relationship further.
John AJohn A
Hi thats possible. you can contact me at ajp27@in.com
ShamilShamil

Steven,

Just off the top of my head… 
Data model that you’re looking for:

            Business entity                                    SFDC object

1. Student                                                        Contact

2. Course                                                         Product*

3. Class (course that belongs to a student)     Class (custom object)

 
*If you’re not on EE or UE , then it’s more reasonable to create a custom object, since Products are not enabled by default for other editions. So I would advise to create a custom object called Course.

 Product (or Course) would have basic info about a course – name, description, list price, etc. – everything that is not student specific.

Class would have fields to capture: 1. Student (a lookup field to contact) 2. Course 3. All your dates 4. Level. 5. Center. 6. Actual sales price.
Thus Class – is a sort of ‘joint’ object between Contact and Product (Course), that implements many-to-many relationship between those entities: Course can belong to multiple Contacts, Contact can attend multiple Courses.

 Run your report to list all Classes and Contacts – and you should get something similar to the graphic you have in Excel.
Steven MSteven M

Thank you.

We actually have Enterprise edition and have defined it slightly differently with on extra step as a custom object

  1. Students are of course listed as Contacts
  2. Enrolments are captured as opportunities. These hold the start and end dates for a particular student
  3. Courses are defined in products
  4. We've created a custom object "Groups" that is the class unit with a certain level, and lookup for course
  5. We've also created a custom object "Group assignments" to assign students to a group

What I can't seem to do is to visualise the x-axis with weeks and the y axis with students showing who is where in which week i.e. I can run a text report showing " students next week" but not a graphic overview of a longer period. Here is a sample screenshot of the Excel we use now:
ShamilShamil
This is indeed an interesting challenge.
I need to play with reporting in SFDC to see how this can be accomplished and of course think about data model too.
Worse case scenario - you'll need an Appexchange app (such as Conga Merge, for example) that would create a better report for you.

P.S. A couple of questions:
1. Please confirm that since you are capturing start and end date on Opportunity level - there is only 1 Contact associated with Opportunity.
2. A quick question - why do you need "Groups" custom object - why not use Opportunity Products (Opportunity Line Items)?
ClaiborneClaiborne
Take a look at what Sam Arjmandi is doing, leveraging Google Visualization with Salesforce.com data.

http://salesforcesource.blogspot.com/2008/10/how-to-easily-bring-graphical-charts.html
Steven MSteven M

Thank you again for your comments :)

  1. The enrolment hierarchy is: Account > Contact > Enrolment but the lookup from Enrolment is the Account. If we need to change this, we will do so...
  2. An enrolment can have many products such as the course, an enrolment fee, accomodation fee, insurance etc. Students join a new or existing "group" that in itself is linked to teachers. I don't think Opportunity products would work but perhaps I see this too narrow. Please let me know how you see this

Again, thank you for helping out getting my head round how we need to (better) structure our data and make this work. 
Ida AppsIda Apps
Hi, I have included below the link to a sample of "interactive" charts we offer as part of our newly released AppExchange. We can create an identical charts to your:

Sample: http://www.salesforce.com/web-common/assets/doccache/MultiForceDir/01530000000YYvXAAW.jpeg
Ida Apps for Google Alerts: http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a0330000006aPHMAA2

Please email me at mina@idaapex.com or call me at 302-454-1835 to discuss.

Regards
Mina