Dreamforce 2026 · Roadmap session · Thursday · 40 min

Education Cloud Roadmap

Everything committed on stage across three releases — Winter '27, Spring, and June — with timestamps back into the recording. Internal reference: expand any item for the detail as presented, or press play to hear that stretch of the session itself.

Forward‑looking

Every item below is forward-looking and unreleased. The team opened by saying they pride themselves on transparency and on hitting the roadmap — “we’re certainly not playing baseball here… we are looking for up in the high 90%.” Treat dates as intent, not commitment.

53%of staff are working across multiple systems
59%plan to upgrade their SIS within three to five years
77%of students expect applying to be as simple as online shopping

Figures cited on stage from Salesforce’s global education survey · 02:49 / 16:04 / 24:15

The customer on stage

Rick Houston · Gordon College · second year a customer has joined the roadmap session

Why they moved to Education Cloud

Architecture. Their grad programs are non-traditional — certificate programs, online courses with no start or end date, even trial programs — none of which fit the old system.
One constituent record. From high-school camper through student, grad student and donor, all the way to planned giving.
Preparing for AI. “We knew this was coming years ago because we were constantly watching the Salesforce roadmap, but we needed to unify our data. We couldn’t have siloed data for our AI.”

Slack in production

Faculty’s number one complaint was being handed another thing to log into — email included, because “email’s a silo, you can’t collaborate.”
Advisors open Slack and see student data straight from the CRM — grades, attendance, everything.
They collaborate on an individual student inside a channel rather than across systems.
“They want to teach… they don’t want to spend time logging in and learning new systems.”

What’s next at Gordon

Advancement moved first, then the graduate programs.
The full SIS migration to Salesforce is the next step — “we’re getting great help with Education Trailblazers on that project.”
Marketing Cloud is now connected through the same system rather than sitting apart.

Admissions pain points he raised

Long applications lower conversion, so they kept the question set as short as possible.
Students unsure of a major were filing three separate applications — an admin headache.
Students are already inside an LLM and already authenticated there.
Serving the application through that surface means fewer fields, a faster process, more valid data and a quicker response.

“All these things — students are in the LLM right now, and so we want to meet them there.”Rick Houston · 25:18 · the remark that set up the application concierge demo

Vanessa — host, release overview, registrar demos
Chris — attendance, advancement
Adam — delegated access, transfer credit, admissions, concierge demo
Hermann — customer interview segments
Rick Houston — Gordon College

Read this before quoting it

Known gaps in the source recording

The recording ends mid-sentence at 39:27 of 40:00, partway through the Summer section. The slides fill that gap: photographs taken in the closing minutes carry the third Summer headline (student financials) and the financials preview, so this page no longer depends on the audio for them.
Names and dates now come from the slides, not the transcript. Three terms the machine transcript garbled are resolved: mortar caps is MortarCAPS, the test connector is the TES Mulesoft Connector, and the major-giving predictor is Major Giving Prediction (Pilot). One is still open: the P-TAT record mentioned during the application build does not appear on any photographed slide.
The June release is marked with a “+” in the deck. Vanessa flagged that some of those features land in June and others toward the end of 2027 — so June items carry more timing risk than the two releases before them.
The photographs are the primary source for names and dates; the audio is the primary source for what was said around them. Where the two disagree, the slide wins on this page. The audio itself is the session recording, re-encoded to 32 kbps mono so the whole 40 minutes ships with the page. Clip boundaries were set by hand from the transcript, so a clip may start a sentence early or run a few seconds into the next topic. Use them to check the flagged terms by ear.
Several items were shown as prototypes, not builds — the academic calendar setup and the program plan builder were both explicitly labelled forward-looking during the demo.
The June 2026 release was not covered in this session. Vanessa pointed to the release notes, the Release Readiness Live videos and the per-release webinar for that one.