WDCi Blogs

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.

Thanks to everyone who visited our stand at Cloudforce in Melbourne and Sydney.  With over 600 in Melbourne and more than 1000 in Sydney, we definitely enjoyed ourselves. Thanks to Boomi and PingIdentity for sponsoring the booth with us.  We had a great time having the Ping guys on our booth in Sydney.

Here’s a few shots from the events:

People crowding to get to our booth

Walter at our booth:

Donal with Andrew Hindle from PingIdentity at our booth:

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..

Integration between systems is not only bringing data over from one system to another. It is an art to get two very different systems working seamless as one. In addition to having your data synchronized in both systems, you can also get a lot of business value from it.

Let’s take a Support System and an Issue Tracking System as an example. You may have a different combination of the following:

• Integrate RightNow with JIRA
• Integrate Netsuite with JIRA
• Integrate Parature with JIRA
• Integrate Salesforce with Bugzilla
• Integrate Salesforce with JIRA

Whatever support system and issue tracking system you are using, you will get similar advantages if you integrate both systems together seamlessly:

#1 Use support volume to prioritize bug fix

Development teams can see the impact a bug has caused and prioritise accordingly. You can link one bug with many support cases together.

#2 Enhanced Communication between Support Engineer and Developer

click to view full picture

Support engineer and developer have a dedicated channel to chat. The content is hidden from the support system and the best thing is you don’t have to create 2 logins for everyone!

#3 Support Engineer to provide more details of the bug

When support engineer goes through the bug verification process, they can fill in useful information and that data will be synchronised over to issue tracking system. For example:

• Environment: Operating system, browser, JVM version
• Steps to reproduce
• etc

All these can be automated by the integration process.

There are more benefits, but I can’t mention them all. If you are interested to find out how to do that, feel free to contact us.

Note: Special thanks to Daggy to share these wonderful ideas!

TIM here again with another tip - don’t tell the boss, he thinks I’m working.

Need to sync or integrate Salesforce data with your other systems?

Maybe you want to sync:

• Accounts/Contacts, Invoice/Sales Order data, payment information, Products and inventory.

So, what are your options?

It depends on what type of  data sync or integration you need and the applications involved, ie:

1. Do you need real-time or near real-time sync of your data?
2. Does the data go one way in or out of Salesforce or are you wanting bi-directional updates?
3. Do you want the whole process automated or are you ok with some manual data loading?
4. Do you have the budget to integrate?
5. Does your Salesforce license allow access to the force.com Web Services API?
6. Is there an existing integration tool that has Connectors/Adapters to your other applications?
7. How customised are your applications?
8. Are there any pre-built integration solutions that solve your problems?

Whew, I’m tired just thinking about it.

Let’s take a look at a couple of scenarios:

Some manual work is ok

A good option here is to use one of the Data Loader tools:

1. http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Apex_Data_Loader
2. http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0330000005kRLFAA2

• Export your data from your application and use the Data Loader to map this data and upload it into Salesforce.

• You can also use the tool to export from Salesforce objects into a database or CSV files, you can then manipulate the data and upload into your target applications.

You need the whole process automated

This is where you will need to plan a bit further before you invest in automating the solution.

Do you know your use-cases?

• You will need to be clear on the process or processes involved and what should be done in the event of failure.  An example of this would be:

• You want Closed/Won Salesforce Opportunities to generate Invoices in your Accounting system automatically.

You also need to consider any limitations of your Accounting system and if your Products are inventoried

• ie what will happen if there is no inventory
• how should the integration process handle such a failure

A good first step here is to take a look at our integration planning guide.

Ok, so you’ve gone through the planning stage and now you want to automate your solution, what tool to choose?

You have a lot of options and the Appexchange is a good place to start.

Some of the key vendors represented include Boomi, Informatica, Pervasive, Cast Iron, Jitterbit and the list goes on.  If you’ve read any of our We Dids you’ll know we are big fans of Boomi and Talend to migrate, manipulate and integrate data.

I’ll cover some of these tools in another blog, but for now, I need a Pina Colada.

There are some good articles from developerforce that teach you how to implement your own Single Sign-On (SSO) solution in your force.com application or Salesforce instance.

• Single Sign-On for Salesforce Client
• How to Implement Single Sign-On with Force.com

Beside solutions recommended from the above website, you can also look into some of the proven technologies that offers you additional benefits. For example: Ping Identity. With Ping Identity’s solutions, you can enjoy all these features:

• Ability to run PingConnect in the cloud or PingFederate on-premise.
• User Account Management with User Provisioning: Activating and deactivating users in your domain with just a few clicks.
• Proven Security Standards: Uses SAML 1.x, SAML 2.0 or WS-Federation standard.
• Flexibility to choose your Identity Store(s): Database, Active Directory/LDAP, Google Apps or even your Salesforce instance.
• Ability to integrate with your existing identity management and security infrastructure (Siteminder, TAM, Oracle Access Manager).
• Rapid Implementation: It takes days to implement the solution.
• Ready Integration Kits: You can integrate to just about anything.
• An SDK to create custom adapters.

If you would like to know more about the Ping Identity solutions, feel free to contact us.

In our attempt to rival Universal Studios, we’ve been at it again, creating videos of some of our ReadyMade integration solutions.  Check out our latest video on how easy it is to integrate Salesforce & MYOB.

Want to know more about how to get Salesforce & MYOB talking? contact us or check out our other MYOB demos and information on our website.

Single Sign on (SSO) for salesforce.com can take various forms.

The Winter 10 version supports SAML2 for salesforce.com and the Salesforce partner & customer portals. It does not support SAML2 for Salesforce Sites yet. (Sheduled for a coming release).

When setting up SSO here are some issues you should consider:

• What is your User or Identity store? Is it an internal store such as Active Directory, Oracle access Manager or a Custom LDAP? or do you want to use a cloud based store like Salesforce, or Google to manage your user identify information?
• Do you have more than one user identity store?
• Do you want to auto provision (activate/create) the Salesforce users (Just in time) or do you have an existing provisioning process?
• Do you want to allow deep linking to URLs? or always force people to login via a “home page” or “dashboard” ?
• Is SSO for your internal users or your customers/partners.  Do you have separate data stores for each?
• Do you want users to keep existing usernames & passwords or get a new “single” username/password?
• Should I use salesforce.com’s Delegated Authentication model or the SAML2 SSO?

Sounds like a lot to think about.

The reality is that there are many variants and solutions to meet your specific requirements.

At WDCi we have been looking at these issues for a while and using our partnership with Ping Identity to provide solutions to  Single Sign On requirements for Salesforce.com and other systems.

Take a look at the Identity pages on our website or contact us for more information on the right solution for SSO for your company.

Enviren implements the WDCi ReadyMade Salesforce-Saasu integration solution, built on the Boomi platform. For more details check out the case study.