Jennifer Spillman, originally from the Buckeye State, is an IT programmer analyst in UIT's Student Success Technology Services office located in Sage Hall. An alumna of UNT, Spillman is looking forward to her second UNT graduation in December with the Master of Science in Information Science and Health Informatics.
Delighted to welcome a certain new UNT student this fall, Spillman's daughter Makenzie will be in the Honors College majoring in new media art.
At Makenzie's recent high school graduation, Spillman said she was asked why she was not upset or sad, and replied that she gets to be closer to her daughter while she attends UNT. Whenever Makenzie needs anything, she knows where to find mom. "That gives me peace of mind, and I am so happy I did not have to send her far away," Spillman said.
As a Salesforce software administrator, Spillman helps to streamline and improve student advising by designing and implementing Salesforce Service Cloud and Console to 10 academic advising offices. The Salesforce console is designed to boost productivity in fast-paced service and sales/recruiting environments.
So, what is salesƒorce.com, inc.?
It is a $6.6 billion corporation headquartered in San Francisco that was founded in 1999 by several former PeopleSoft employees. Its stock, CRM, is about $83.57↑ on the New York Stock Exchange. Salesforce also is the name given to the company's customer relationship management products, such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Force.com, Chatter and Work.com.
Spillman maintains UNT's version of the Salesforce for higher education configuration and provides consistent, ongoing functional business processes and knowledge for university recruitment, enrollment, admissions and advising. Read more about UNT's Salesforce project expansion in this edition of Benchmarks Online.
In June 2014, Spillman knew nothing about Salesforce other than its $56 stock price, she said.
"When John Hooper, former UNT CIO and vice provost for information technology, approached me with the opportunity to work with Salesforce, I jumped at the prospect of working with a new and unique project," she said.
Currently, Spillman provides end-user training for all UNT super-users in the advising offices and helps them to learn the report functionality in the software. Before that, Spillman first had to build the customized case layout for the Division of Student Affairs. She also helped with the rollout for the Office of Admissions and University Relations, Communications and Marketing to provide UNT with a better way to manage and track interactions with approximately 30,000 undergraduate and 7,000 graduate students.
Designing custom security, role hierarchy, user profiles and permission sets in the current Salesforce organization is a big portion of Spillman's focus. She also works with the IT Shared Services Directory Services office to connect and enable single-sign-on capabilities in the Salesforce organization to LDAP, an industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet protocol network. In general, people do not like remembering multiple usernames and passwords, she said, and single sign on, SSO, enables end users to sign into Salesforce with their UNT employee user identification, EUID, and network password.
"The best thing about working in IT is that technology is always changing. I love the challenge of learning new things and streamlining into a business process. I love empowering my end users to make their jobs more efficient," Spillman said. "My favorite part about working at UNT is the close-knit community. I have always found that most people I work around really care about each other. UNT also fosters a family-friendly work environment."
As a Salesforce administrator, Spillman has attended hours of training for Salesforce, including the following courses.
- Salesforce - Administration Essentials for New Admins
- Salesforce - Building Application with Force.com
- Demand Tools MassImpact
- Demand Tools MassEffect
- Demand Tools PowerGrid
- Demand Tools Single Table Dedupe
- Demand Tools Find/Report IDs
Wait. What? Let us pause here for a moment – and a definition. The word of the day has to be dedupe. Did you catch that word? RUKM? Ok, so maybe it is new to only a few of us.
Deduping: de-duplication, a batch process that can be done on huge lists of words; a specialized data compression technique for eliminating duplicate copies of repeating data.
Spillman frequently takes part in double- and triple-geeking, too, of course. Don't you just love 21st-century lexicon? Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, Zip-A-Dee-A!
Moving on.
Born and raised in the Rose City of Springfield, Ohio, west of Columbus, Spillman is accomplished, talented and comes from a proud heritage in Ohio. Also from Springfield are famous jazz musicians, such as Johnny Lytle, and Call Cobbs Jr.; Hollywood legends Lillian Gish and Jonathan Winters; and sports figures Will McEnaney, a left-handed World Series pitcher among others, and now, of course, technology guru, Jennifer Spillman.
Leaving Ohio in 2006, her husband's job brought the Spillman family of five, two boys and one girl, to Texas. A running and swimming enthusiast, Spillman's favorite app is Apple Health to track her 10,000+ steps a day. She uses the 7 Minute Workout Challenge app to sneak in a workout in the middle of the day. Spillman also enjoys home improvement projects, such as tiling, painting, wood-working and furniture restoration.
This summer you will find Spillman perusing her graduate course textbook, "Health Informatics for Medical Librarians,"by Ana D. Cleveland and Donald B. Cleveland, and "No Excuses: The True Story of a Congenital Amputee Who Became a Champion in Wrestling and in Life,"by Kyle Maynard.
Editor's Note: Please note that information in each edition of Benchmarks Online is likely to change or degrade over time, especially links to various websites. For current information on a specific topic, search the UNT website, UNT's UIT Help Desk or the World Wide Web. Email your questions and comments to the UNT University Information Technology Department or call 940-565-4068.