blueEnergy Delivers Renewable Energy to Rural Nicaraguans with Aid from Salesforce Content and CRM

“Without Salesforce Content, our employees and volunteers across the globe could not collaborate effectively on a day-to-day basis. Features like tagging and full-text search make it easy for everyone to contribute and find content, just like on our favorite consumer Web sites.”


Challenge
  • blueEnergy—which provides a low-cost, sustainable solution to the energy needs of marginalized communities through the creation of hybrid wind and solar energy systems—needed a central repository for documents
  • Extending an existing SugarCRM system to include document management required technical skills volunteers didn’t have time to acquire
  • Users found SugarCRM difficult to learn, resulting in poor adoption and files sent using e-mail
  • The San Francisco-based organization required a solution easily accessible by users on three continents

Solution
  • blueEnergy selected Salesforce Enterprise Edition CRM and Salesforce Content, swapping out SugarCRM in less than a month
  • While supporting SugarCRM required developer skills in PHP, blueEnergy’s IT systems administrator was able to customize Salesforce after only a week of training
  • The search, filtering, and tagging features of Salesforce Content made it easy for users to locate relevant documents
  • Users also subscribe to receive relevant documents automatically when content of interest is created or updated
  • Workspaces differentiate general from internal-only documents, and ensure critical information stays within the organization
  • To add even greater functionality to Salesforce, blueEnergy installed Project-on-Demand, a donated project management app from the AppExchange marketplace
  • Cases allow the organization to monitor workflow and assign internal help desk resources

Results
  • Salesforce Content provides a central repository for documents, making them easily accessible to users across multiple continents
  • Ease-of-use drives user adoption; robust intranet feature-set has created demand for access that exceeds current number of licenses
  • Community-based tagging drives efficient search for relevant content
  • Reports and dashboards are easily generated and relay vital information such as the number of grant applications open and filed
  • blueEnergy has plans to use Sesame Software’s Relational Junction to integrate Salesforce into the organization’s accounting system
 
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