Upending the Status Quo: Salesforce and the Future of Student Information Systems
The Student Information System (SIS) has long held a place of importance in higher education. It’s often considered the lifeblood of student data, critical to everything from enrollment to graduation. For many of us who’ve worked in the field, it can also be a source of frustration: rigid, slow to evolve, and disconnected from the expectations of today’s learners.
I spent twelve years working in higher ed, with eight of those in Admissions. During that time, we relied heavily on Ellucian Banner, not just for recruitment and application processing, but as the system where students applied and interacted with the institution. It was also the same system I used when I applied to college. Thirteen years later after the fact, nothing had changed. But things began to evolve once Salesforce entered the picture.
Recruitment and Admissions was the first area to move out of Banner. This was an easy starting point given the sales-like nature of prospective student engagement. With Salesforce, we began managing marketing campaigns, applications, enrollment analytics, and student data—all in one place. What had previously lived in a rigid system, Banner, was now handled in a flexible, user-friendly system that worked better for Admissions Counselors/Advisors, Admissions Managers, and students alike.
This transition was my entrance into the ecosystem where I served as the business product owner. During the transition, I was often asked: “Is Banner really going away?” At the time, the answer was no. Salesforce was the System of Engagement, while Banner remained the System of Record. But in practice, Salesforce had become the System of Origin, Record, and Engagement for Admissions with Banner serving only to support the next stage in the student lifecycle.
Institutions have historically invested heavily in ERP systems like Ellucian Banner, Workday, and PeopleSoft, platforms built to handle HR, Finance, Facilities, and SIS functionality in one. While these systems offer institutional breadth, they often fall short in adapting to the evolving needs of students and campus staff. This has resulted in Institutions layering on engagement tools to fill the gaps, especially in the SIS domain.
So what if Salesforce could be your SIS?
A Shift in Mindset: From Monolith to Modular
Cloud for Good Founder and CEO Tal Frankfurt recently shared his excitement about Salesforce Education Cloud’s growing SIS capabilities. While I’m still trying to figure out his chicken-and-elephant analogy (you’ll have to read it), one thing is clear: the technology mindset on campus is shifting.
For decades, ERP systems were treated as the institutional source of truth, expected to manage everything from payroll to course registration. Now we’re seeing this centralized model cracking. Institutions are embracing cloud-first strategies, building data warehouses, investing in modern APIs, and removing their dependency on a single system to do it all, favoring separate but connected systems that can evolve independently while still working together seamlessly.
The question is no longer “Is Banner going away?” It’s “What’s the right tool for the right job?”
Rather than treating the ERP as the Earth and every other system as orbiting satellites, institutions are moving toward a “roundtable” model—where each system plays a defined role, shares data freely, and acts as a system of record for its domain. In this model:
The ERP continues supporting HR, accounting, and financial aid disbursement
Salesforce Education Cloud powers recruitment, enrollment, advising, course management, and student engagement
A Data Lake or Warehouse aggregates information from all systems to drive reporting and analytics
This isn’t about eliminating systems, it’s about reducing reliance on legacy ERPs and empowering tools to deliver value to users.
Financial aid, for example, may still be disbursed through the ERP, but that doesn’t mean the entire process needs to live there. Award status, document uploads, and verification workflows are far better served through modern, student-centric interfaces that improve clarity and reduce service requests. Similarly, course registration through Advanced Academic Operations is now available directly within Salesforce Education Cloud (released Summer 2025), offering a more intuitive and accessible experience from planning to enrollment.
We are not abandoning the idea of reducing tech debt, but redefining what that means. We’ve learned that forcing everything into one monolithic platform often creates more complexity, not less. The goal isn’t to consolidate everything into a single system, it’s to orchestrate purpose-built tools that are interoperable, agile, and aligned to how students and staff actually work. This is where long-term efficiency and value come from.
Salesforce Education Cloud: Built for the Modern Student Journey
As I mentioned earlier, SIS functionality is already present in Education Cloud, especially at the front end of the student journey. While many institutions have moved Recruitment and Admissions out of their ERPs, there’s growing interest in how Salesforce can support core academic operations like course and degree management. Here’s where that functionality is already taking shape:
Education Cloud enables institutions to manage advisor-learner relationships, monitor academic standing, and deliver proactive student support. It gives staff and faculty a holistic view of each learner and the tools to take action.
The Education Cloud data architecture allows institutions to manage course offerings, sections, instructors, and modalities. It lays the foundation for native course registration and academic planning.
Institutions are able to define degree programs, certificates, and non-credit pathways within Education Cloud, allowing for required and optional courses as well as defining prerequisites. These structured plans guide learners while giving staff visibility into progress and completion.
Learners can visual degree tracking with automated recommendations, helping students understand what they’ve completed and what’s next. It supports on-time completion and smart course selection.
A tool to help prospective and current students compare academic programs based on their goals, interests, and academic history, making exploration more personalized and data-informed.
Agentforce for Education brings Salesforce’s newest suite of intelligent AI agents to higher ed, enabling autonomous, accurate, and proactive support across the student lifecycle.
In addition to these core capabilities, Education Cloud also supports key Academic Operations functions such as:
Transcript Generation – Using OmniStudio Document Generation to produce official/unofficial transcripts from Salesforce data
Scholarship Management – Leveraging the same flexible architecture used in Admissions and Grants
Enrollment & Retention Analytics – Powered by CRM Analytics, Tableau Next, and native reports/dashboards
With the recent release of course registration and holds and waitlists this summer, looking ahead, we expect more SIS capabilities on the roadmap, such as billing and payments. Because Education Cloud is part of Salesforce Industries, it benefits from cross-industry functionality, drawing from financial services, healthcare, and more to address higher ed’s unique complexities.
Collectively, all of this supports the broader shift to a “roundtable” model, where the SIS is no longer just a record-keeping tool, but a connected, configurable part of a coordinated student experience ecosystem.
Why It’s Time to Reimagine the Role of the SIS
Reducing systems does NOT mean putting everything into one platform. Remember that we’ve tried that before and it led to rigid, monolithic ERPs. The goal isn’t consolidation, it’s orchestration: aligning purpose-built systems that are interoperable, agile, and focused on student needs.
Today’s learners expect personalized, seamless, mobile-first experiences. Institutions need technology that can scale, adapt quickly, and be configured without heavy development cycles. Salesforce Education Cloud offers a new path forward, not by replacing everything overnight, but by reimagining what the SIS can be: modular, student-centered, and built for what’s next.
