Veracross Community Transition

Overview

As part of our continuing commitment to providing the best post-sales service to our customer community, we are busy at work building out a new Salesforce-based community portal, which will launch on July 12, 2021. This article is written for school point people and contains what you need to know to ensure a smooth transition:

• New security roles you can add to your staff members' security details in Axiom granting the level of access you want. 
• Enumerating which categories of tickets we will bring over from Freshdesk into Salesforce. 
• Details about what is new and what is changing in the new ticketing system.

New Security Roles

To grant access to our new Veracross Community, you need to add one of several security roles to staff members. They are available in your system now. You can add them anytime as they do not affect any current functionality.
Please Note: Community security roles are required even for Sysadmin users to access the Veracross Community.

Important: Only assign one of the following roles to any given person's security detail in Axiom:

Migration Timeline

Please plan on Freshdesk becoming unavailable beginning at 6:00 PM (Eastern) on Friday, July 9, 2021 (please note that this is a change from the previously announced start time of 7:00 PM Eastern). The new Salesforce-based Veracross Community will launch at 6:00 AM (Eastern) on Monday, July 12, 2021 and replaces Freshdesk. For any urgent issues that occur during this weekend that cannot wait for the new community launch (for example, the system or a major feature is down), please email our emergency line at emergency@veracross.com.

Beginning on July 12, please plan on accessing all knowledge (documentation, Q&A, etc.) in the new Veracross Community. Learn Veracross will be deprecated (meaning it will no longer be updated) as of that date but will remain accessible for several months to allow you time to update bookmarks to the corresponding Veracross Community articles. 

Migrating Tickets From Freshdesk

We'll migrate the following tickets from Freshdesk to Salesforce:

• All tickets with these statuses:
  • open
  • in process
  • on hold
• Tickets with these statuses that have been updated within the last 60 days:
  • awaiting your reply
  • resolved 
  • closed 
• All "support call notes" tickets regardless of status

Any updates made before July 9 at 6:00 PM (Eastern) will be included in the migration. 

Watch the Video Overview

What's Changing

Here is a list of the changes to anticipate with the new Veracross Community:

New Functionality

• Knowledge is integrated into search and you'll get auto-suggestions when entering cases.
• The knowledge base will begin to grow significantly faster as a result of moving to Salesforce and adopting new knowledge management practices.
• You will have visibility into your reported software defects.
• You and your designated users — you control permissions directly in Axiom — will have single sign-on (SSO) directly from Axiom. 
• The drop-downs on case details will be "smart" to show you features specific to your school, and your new cases will automatically route to the appropriate group (TST or an implementation manager) depending on where you are in the implementation process.
• The Salesforce platform will give us vastly better reporting and notifications, helping us to better identify and implement support, product, and knowledge improvements.
• Coming Soon: We will build out integrated peer-to-peer forums for you to talk with each other.
• Coming Soon: You will have visibility into and the ability to manage and vote on enhancements. 

A Few Things Are Changing

• In order to ensure that our support team is focused on your immediate issues, support cases will be auto-closed after 10 business days if they have a status of 'Resolved' and after 12 business days if they have a status of 'Awaiting Your Response.' Several reminders will be sent before cases are auto-closed. Once closed, cases can be viewed but cannot be reopened.
• You will not be able to create a new case via email. Submitting cases via email bypasses routing rules and knowledge, potentially letting cases fall through the cracks or not letting you know about an article that might have solved your issue.
• You cannot reply to a case notification email to add a comment to the case. Salesforce does not support this feature, but we've included a link directly to the case in the notification, so responding is just a click away.
• You can only add one cc email address to a case, as Salesforce does not support multiple cc'd users at this time. Copied users will also only receive notifications about replies from the Veracross team, and will not be able to view the case itself unless they also have community super user access (this is the same as Freshdesk).

Questions and Answers

1. What is happening to the Learn Veracross documentation site? Knowledge is moving the new Veracross Community. 
   • Though we will be deprecating Learn Veracross and no longer adding new updates there beginning on July 12th, the links to existing articles will remain active for several months after the migration. 
   • Eventually, they will be disabled, but at go-live, you will still have access to support articles you may have bookmarked, and we will let you know before those links go away.
     
     
2. Since only closed tickets updated within the last 60 days will be migrated, what will happen to tickets that were closed that contained enhancements? Closed tickets that were last updated more than 60 days, including enhancement tickets, will not be migrated to the new Veracross Community. However, the enhancements discussed in those tickets will be available once we launch our new feedback system this year. 
   • When we close a ticket that contains an enhancement, we currently log that enhancement in another internal system. 
   • As we prepare to launch the new feedback platform, which will be integrated with the Veracross Community and will allow you to vote for and manage your enhancements, previously-logged enhancements will be migrated from our old internal system to the new system.
     
     
3. In the past, Veracross has tried to limit the number of Client Portal Users to one technical lead. With the new Community permissions, are we now encouraged to allow more users? Yes! Now that the new Community has a wealth of self-serve resources, we are encouraging you to add more users so that your team has access to quick answers and other resources in order to be more empowered to use Veracross. 
   • Though you can tailor the permission assignments to meet your needs, we imagine that you will typically only have a few Community_Super_User members who can view all cases and bugs across departments.
   • Then assign the Community_Standard_User role to your department champions. 
   • You may want to give additional users within those departments the Community_Read_Only_User role so that they can have full access to all Community resources, but still encourage them to work with the department champion rather than submit cases directly.  
     
     
4. During the migration weekend when FreshDesk is unavailable, how can I get support if I have an issue? Freshdesk will not longer be available beginning at 6:00 p.m. ET on Friday, July 9, 2021. After that time, we ask that you please wait to submit any new support issues until Monday morning when the new Veracross Community is available. If there is an urgent issue over the weekend, such as a major feature or systemwide outage, you can send an email to emergency@veracross.com. We thank you in advance for your cooperation and understanding during this migration window!
   
   
5. So Sysadmin Users need the new security roles to access the Veracross Community? Yes, the new security roles allow you to be very specific about who can access the Community, and what level of access they have to view resources, view and submit cases, etc. For that reason, even Sysadmin users must have a security role applied if they will be accessing the community. Users without one of the security roles will only have access to the unauthenticated version of the Veracross Community, which only provides access to written documentation and product updates.