Case Study: University of the Nations achieves streamlined, localized global course and student administration with Heroku

Global Educator Runs All Course and Student Administration on Heroku + Sales Cloud

University of the Nations is a global Christian academic institution with 600 locations in 180 nations, offering courses in 97 languages and training about 18,000 students a year. Faced with the challenge of centralizing student and course administration while preserving local autonomy and multilingual needs, their legacy SQL Server/Access/ColdFusion stack was too rigid, hard to maintain, and couldn’t deliver the localized, performant experience required—especially in low-bandwidth regions.

UofN rebuilt on Salesforce Sales Cloud as the system of record and deployed a customer-facing app on Heroku (AngularJS front end with Node.js/Express back end), using Salesforce REST APIs, Force.com/Visualforce for specific admin tasks, and Redis for session and translation caching. Integrating Salesforce Translation Workbench and Heroku Pipelines enabled fast localization, development, and deployment; the result was happier, more productive developers, wider adoption across campuses (replacing paper processes), increased student engagement and staff efficiency, and cleaner, more accessible data.

University of the Nations

Eric Jones

Engineer, University of the Nations