Last week several of us were in San Fransisco for the Salesforce user convention, Dreamforce. 170,000 humans descended on to the city to learn, be inspired and connect with other like-minded Salesforce junkies. It was an incredible experience. 

The MEC team has been busy learning about eComm Salesforce security (what users can see and do in Salesforce). We have documented questions to help prepare for a follow-up deep dive session with ACF and the CoE. As it stands now, we think we will require some additional permission sets that would be specific to the MECs and community managers. But, the two core profiles, at a high level, appear to be able to support the majority of our users. We should be on target to assign users to profiles on time. 

In addition to learning about security, the MECs have also been reviewing Affiliation with Scope values and data. We're waiting on descriptions from a few of the campuses and with that we will be able to create reports and validate against our other source systems.

The CoE continues to work with IDM teams on provisioning. There are two paths to take: a Salesforce-specific solution or one that is at the IDM level and ultimately would be the more long-term, strategic and ideal approach. Both paths are relatively the same cost and so naturally the consensus is to push for the latter. The downside of the taking the enterprise approach is that it would delay the launch of our online community. We would need to provide an interim solution to collect updated contact information from our alumni in the absence of the community, which we believe can be accomplished via web-based form functionality. 

For phase 2, the CoE is currently negotiating with Cvent on license pricing and have started technical, integration conversations. We do not know a status on Form Assembly. We will be meeting with someone from Vertiba who will provide staff augmentation to the CoE to support Phase II implementation. We will meet this person next week. 

The CoE still feels confident that we are on schedule to go live in November, giving MECs access in production at that time. We'll open things up to our super user base in December and then all users in January. We are currently looking at the week of January 11 for eCommference.