WDCi Blogs

Got MYOB, got Salesforce?  Check out this case study for details on how Upskilled uses a pre-built integration solution to get MYOB and Salesforce talking.

Got Salesforce, got Bugzilla?  Life would be easier if they were connected right?  Checkout a quick video on integrating Salesforce and Bugzilla using the Dell Boomi platform.

Dell Boomi has just launched a certification program for their partners.  If you’re asking yourself is this an attempt at shameless self promotion, you’re right, WDCi is one of the first certified partners.  Boomi announced the list of initial certified partners in their Spring Product Release announcement.

Details on the certification program can be found here: http://help.boomi.com/display/BOD/AtomSphere+Certification+Program.

Magento has a different data model for customer. It’s more like a ‘contact’ centric system then an ‘account’ centric system. It treats all customer as an individual instead of a company.

If you are integrating Magento with Salesforce, perhaps you should consider the Person Account feature. It would be the good fit for the design.

If you really have to get the company information from Magento customer, you can get it from the address object. One Magento customer can have more than one addresses. Designing how the data synchronised between two different data set is crucial.

Feel free to contact us if you are interested to know more.

Check out our new we did here:

http://wdcigroup.net/wedidintegration_salesforcenetsuiteopenair.html

This new integration involved 3 endpoints. (Salesforce, OpenAir and Netsuite)

Hear Amrith Nambiar from Mindjet talk about running integration in a 100% cloud environment and Bill Vanderwall from Scientific Learning on integrating in a hybrid cloud and on-premise environment:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWVwXftgNgI
  

Some interesting take aways:

• Nate Bride talks about the Boomi community approach and gives a plug to the WDCi built JIRA connector that is available via the Boomi public atomsphere - thanks Nate.
• Bill talks about selecting Boomi over Cast Iron due to the user interface but most importantly due to the Total Cost of Ownership - Boomi is more affordable.
• Both Bill and Amrith talk about the complexity of bidirectional integration of data, ie which system is the master and how to ensure data integrity in this model.

• Amrith’s 4 keys to success:

1. Focus on the business process.
2. Limit your scope to only what systems are needed for your first project.
3. Get the right partner (thanks Amrith).
4. Accept that the interfaces/integration processes will be tuned over time -  don’t expect to build out everything in the first phase if you have complex or dependent business processes.

• Amrith mentions the custom reporting and error handling infrastructure we have put in place to enable Mindjet to check and validate synchronised data between Salesforce and Netsuite.
• At the end of the recording, you can hear Walter Dewildt from WDCi answer a question on how to decide if you should push volumes of data to your target application or simply expose data in the source and retrieve as necessary.

Want to know more, check out the Mindjet case study http://www.boomi.com/customers/success/standardizing-back-office-application-integrations-minimal-it-support

If you are, then you no doubt have encountered the security team of your company. If you are small enough to not have a security team, then you probably can get by with opening some firewall ports, but otherwise you may be in for a long wait, and a few lively discussions.

Typically,  security teams do not like to trust “SaaS platforms” and open up firewall ports for inbound connections.

A common problem I see is that while even the most flexible organisations may have infrastructure to deal with this in a secured zone like UAT or Production, most of us have development servers on our internal domain, and getting that opened through the firewall for inbound services is very unlikely to happen. If it does it will most likely require expensive services and additional routers ensure the path through is secured.

So how can you get around this issue?  Dell-Boomi the leader in SaaS integration has a neat solution. Outbound connections and webServices are a dime a dozen, and when they happen through a regular port (443 outbound) then they are simple.

What if you could get a platform like Salesforce.com or Rightnow or Netsuite to call an internal service, that  was proxied  through a firewall friendly connection.  E.G. a Salesforce.com sandbox calling an internal service running on your Dev server without opening a firewall port, all secured by an enterprise ready integration platform.

This is available today, and probably at a fraction of the cost and effort to get your security team involved in opening firewall ports.

if you want to know more, come talk to us at WDCi. We can help you get set up in days, not weeks.

Another blockbuster hits the waves, check out our latest demo, this time it’s JIRA Studio to salesforce.com.

Whew, time for a pina colada.

Want to see how easily you can integrate Salesforce and Netsuite?

Grab a pina colada and some popcorn and check out our short demo showing a common use case - Integrating Opportunity and related objects between Salesforce and Netsuite.

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..