Salesforce: Setting up Student Linking Logic

Link your students to Salesforce records via Salesforce’s Student-linking logic within your Skilljar Dashboard. 

Skilljar’s Default Student-linking

To set up the linking logic for Students, you will need to install the Salesforce integration to your Skilljar dashboard. For more information, see Installing the Salesforce Integration Salesforce App. Once you’ve downloaded and installed the Skilljar Salesforce App, you can automatically link your student contacts to your Salesforce records, and create new contacts if one doesnt already exist by enabling the Student-linking logic on the Salesforce settings on your Skilljar Dashboard.

1. Open your Skilljar dashboard and access the Salesforce settings page.
2. Expand Authentication Settings.
3. Select the box by Link Contacts.
   • • This setting will only link contacts if the student email is found in an existing contact email field.
4. (Optional) Select the box for Create New Contacts in SFDC if you want Skilljar to create a new Contact object if none are found with the student's email. 
5. Select Save and Re-authenticate with Salesforce.

Once enabled, we’ll automatically search for a matching contact record when a new student is created on Skilljar by comparing the email addresses between the two. If a matching Contact is found, we’ll link them to the most recently updated contact on Salesforce.

If Create new contacts setting is enabled, If a contact with the same email address can’t be found (known as an orphaned contact), we’ll create a new one on Salesforce and link the student to it. 

Note Regarding Using Orphaned Contacts

Newly created orphaned contacts may need to be associated with an account, or converted to a Lead - which your SFDC admin will need to configure within your SFDC instance. We reccomend that if you are using the "create new contacts" setting, your Admin uses Salesforce automation tools to customize the linking logic and set the appropriate handling of orphaned contacts. For automation, we recommend using Salesforce Flow Builder for the most common use cases, and APEX triggers for more complex scenarios. You can read more about linking with Salesforce Flow Builder at Customizing Student Linking Logic in Salesforce Flow Builder.