Considerations for Document Management

Review some considerations before starting to work with documents in Admissions Connect.

Admissions Connect provides basic document management. To see documents in the Admissions Connect components, they must be saved as a Salesforce File. When a document is uploaded to a Document Checklist Item, it gets saved as a Salesforce File. You can upload any file type to a Document Checklist Item, except Asset Files. However, only these file types display in the Admissions Connect components.

• .pdf

  Copy-protected PDFs can't be previewed.

• .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlxs, and .ppx

  This includes Microsoft® Office 97 through Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Some Microsoft Office documents can't be previewed and some don't display correctly in previews. For example, some documents don't provide a preview for all pages.

• .jpg, .jpeg, .bmp, .gif, and .png

• .txt, .rtf

To learn about additional preview considerations, review Content file preview issues in Salesforce Help.

Each Document Checklist Item must have a unique Salesforce File. In other words, you can't attach a Salesforce File that's already been added to another Document Checklist Item. The Salesforce File can, however, be attached to other records in Salesforce, like an Application.

Your institution may want to retain documents for a certain number of years or delete them after a certain number of admissions cycles. Admissions Connect doesn't provide specialized automation or archival tools for document management. Your institution should create a plan that covers the full document life cycle. If you're worried about space limits, see File Size and Sharing Limits and Data and Files Storage Allocations in Salesforce Help and talk to your Account Executive.

Applicants might apply to your institution multiple times, such as an undergraduate and then again as a graduate student. Make sure that any automation you implement takes this into account. You don't want application documents associated with the wrong application. 

To help admissions staff and applicants understand the status of documents more easily, we show the status of Document Checklist Items as follows.

Admissions Connect provides this automation for updating Document Checklist Item Statuses.

Note For these updates to work, there must be a Status value with an API name of Pending on the Document Checklist Item object.

• When a user uploads a document for the first time, the Status updates from New to Pending. 

• When a user uploads a new version of a rejected document, the Status updates from Rejected to Pending.

• When a user approves a rejected document, manually updating the Status from Pending to Approved, the Rejection Comment field is cleared.

• When a user uploads a new version of an already approved document, the Status updates from Accepted to Pending.

It's up to your institution to set up additional automation and validation rules for documents. Think about how the Status of a Document Checklist Item changes over the course of the entire admissions process, accounting for actions performed by your admissions staff, external reviewers, and applicants. Also think about creating validation rules which can prevent admissions staff from accepting and rejecting Document Checklist Items that don't have a file attached.