WDCi Blogs

Lets say that you have a database internally that holds some of your key data. You have just implemented a CRM in Salesforce and you want to be able to reference (lookup) this data in real time.

You have a couple of choices:
1) Copy all the data into Salesforce and keep the two systems synchronised. This is ok, and if you need the data frequently may be the best way to go

2) Keep the data in the database, and just look it up from there.

For option 2, this used to involve a fair bit of setup and a bit of custom coding to get it to all work nicely, and more importantly to work securely. A couple of recent features to two products has just made this easier.

Firstly, Salesforce.com has introduced a new feature to allow you to generate your own certificate to securely call a web Service inside your company firewall and be sure that the originator of the request was in fact your own Salesforce instance. See the following write-up for more info.. http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Making_Authenticated_Web_Service_Callouts_Using_Two-Way_SSL

Secondly, Boomi has released a feature to expose a database query, or Stored procedure as a web Service that can be called in real time. This release from Boomi has opened up a whole range of possibilities to quickly and securely expose internal services to SaaS based applications.

For more information on this or other integration stories give us a call at WDCi..

Well, it depends…

Ok, I realise that isn’t helpful, so here’s an example.

First some assumptions/caveats on Salesforce and Netsuite integration:

1. Your implementations of Salesforce and Netsuite are in reasonable order, customization is ok, we’re just assuming that you haven’t used duplicate field names in Netsuite and if so, that you understand your data and can identify these.
2. We also assume that you will play a large part in the identifying the fields to be mapped in each system.
3. Systems will be locked down during development.
4. Data migration is not part of the exercise.
5. We’re using an integration tool that has connectors/adapters for each system.

So, assuming the above, here’s an idea of how long we would take to integrate 3 common objects between Netsuite & Salesforce, ie Account-Customer, Contact-Contact and Opportunity-Opportunity or Opportunity-Invoice.  Our approach is rapid not reckless:

Can we do it quicker?

• It depends on the assumptions above and how quickly you can work with us to complete the job.

What typically impacts the time-line?

• Field mapping detail and complexity
• A clearly defined and well understood business process
• System availability, People availability (sign-off, testing)
• Data cleanliness (see this blog on the impact of data quality)

Want to know more, just ping us and we can quickly give you a scope of how long it would take.  You can also check out our We Did section on our website for some examples of recent integrations we have built.