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Project Progress: From Discovery to Build

This is the first in a series of regular updates on the Buff Experience Transformation project—our initiative to modernize ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½Æƽâ°æÏÂÔØ's student engagement and support infrastructure through Salesforce Education Cloud. In late March 2026, we completed discovery and transitioned into active build and configuration. Our implementation partner Cloud for Good, which is building the core functionality, conducted over 30 sessions with more than 50 subject matter experts, mapping 7 business processes and developing 15 foundational deliverables including personas, data models, and user stories. The Office of Information Technology’s Learner Engagement Technology (LET) team is transitioning essential functionality from the legacy Buff Portal Advising system/CRM01 to Education Cloud while maintaining current legacy systems to ensure service stability throughout the project. The LET team also conducted an additional 15 discovery sessions through March and early April. Ìý

What's Happening Now and Next

A demonstration of the recent work completed by the project team was presented to over 65 people on April 20. In the coming weeks, the project team will refine user stories, schedule more sprint demonstrations and testing sessions, and finalize approval of remaining discovery deliverables. Build sprints will follow an iterative cycle with subject matter expert validation after each demo. Configuration and development work continues through October 2026, followed by end-user testing and training. Information about future phases of the project is available on the CRM program website.

Key Decisions

In early March, we held a two-day Minimum Viable Product (MVP) workshop with campus partners and students to align priorities. That helped to finalize our approach: leveraging Salesforce Education Cloud to overcome current system limitations and implementing four parallel workstreams as follows:

• Build Education Cloud core and learner success functionality for Continuing Education – led by Cloud for Good
• Retire legacy Salesforce org (CRM01/BPA) – led by CTO from Salesforce and LET
• Transition from Marketing Cloud org MC01 to new MC05 org – led by Marcus Thomas (Devs United)
• Maintenance and ongoing support of current orgs – led by LET

Decisions still in progress include detailed MVP feature prioritization, data migration scope and timelines, and the Marketing Cloud subscription data model.

Stay connected

We know many of you have questions about scope, timeline, system capabilities, and unit inclusion—including whether all Buff Portal Advising users and features will be included at launch, and how this effort differs from previous initiatives. We are committed to transparency: this is a phased implementation with core functionality at launch and continued expansion over time, supported by executive sponsorship, formal governance and working groups.

, held on Wednesdays at 2:30 p.m., are open to all campus stakeholders. Updates and working group information will be shared through ongoing campus communications. Reach out to the project team with questions or to engage more deeply. Your partnership is essential as we build a more connected, personalized student experience at ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½Æƽâ°æÏÂÔØ. Ìý

Each week, this summary is created with the support of Microsoft Copilot and project notes across all Buff Experience Transformation working groups and meetings.