Integrating with Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com (aka Salesforce) is the most commonly used cloud-based Software as a Service platform for Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Recently, we have been involved with a lot of customers who are planning to start migrating to or have made a strategic decision to use Salesforce to manage their customer contacts, track sales orders, streamline their sales processes, etc. In fact, Prolifics itself is a Salesforce customer.

Our own experiences, and those with our customers who use Salesforce, have given us an in-depth understanding of what it takes to ensure that this CRM solution is made universally available within the enterprise – to business processes that require customer information or to portal applications that mash up customer information with data from other systems. This blog entry details three patterns that we have commonly used when integrating with Salesforce and that we believe can be reused – entirely at the design level and to a good extent at the implementation level.

1. Enterprise CRM Services – Every enterprise has defined standards when it comes to their enterprise services and data formats. The reusable enterprise services are exposed via the ESB and all the end applications use these enterprise services to communicate with end systems so that the ESB can provide the common functionality and the governance needed when performing system integration. Using this same concept when working with Salesforce allows enterprises to centralize the Salesforce integration at the ESB layer (the ESB communicates with Salesforce using SOAP/HTTP web services), do transformation, security, etc. at one common place and provide clients – processes, portals or mashups, etc. – with the consistent enterprise-wide data representation to which they are accustomed. The enterprise services provide the generic CRM interface to the clients, so that if the CRM system has to be changed, the hundreds of clients that use the CRM system in the enterprise do not have to change. The IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus is commonly used for implementing this pattern.

2. Publish CRM Data – Another common requirement is to ensure that CRM data is passed from Salesforce to back end systems based upon changes that happen within Salesforce to this information. The ESB provides a service (SOAP/HTTP web service) that gets invoked by Salesforce (with all the relevant information from Salesforce) when data of interest changes in Salesforce. This data is then transformed and passed to the back end systems. The benefits of this approach include a centralized service definition on the ESB, transformation of data, centralized security management, supporting legacy applications that are not web service enabled [but still need CRM data], etc. The IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus or IBM WebSphere Message Broker is commonly used for implementing this pattern. [Note: the reverse flow from end systems to Salesforce is handled similarly, instead of being invoked by Salesforce; the ESB invokes a service on Salesforce.]

3. Bulk Load of CRM data – It is very typical for customers to need the ability to bulk load customer data from their existing homegrown systems into Salesforce. These kinds of requirements are also common when mergers and acquisitions happen and new customer data needs to be loaded. During the bulk load of CRM data, there may also be a need to cleanse the information before loading it into Salesforce. The IBM InfoSphere DataStage, IBM InfoSphere QualityStage, and the IBM InfoSphere Information Server Pack for Salesforce.com together support this pattern that involves the definition of ETL jobs that extract data from different sources, cleanse, map the data to Salesforce format, and load it into Salesforce.

I want to conclude by saying that we at Prolifics believe in “eating our own dog food.” Prolifics has a production implementation of IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus that was built using the pattern described above (Publish CRM Data) that enables the data we have in our Salesforce instance to be published to IBM’s Global Partner Portal based on Siebel.

In my next set of blog entries, I will focus on couple of related topics:

• IBM’s acquisition of Cast Iron Systems and how the solution supports these patterns of integrating with Salesforce


• A set of assets that we are currently working on at Prolifics to help customers jump start their own Salesforce integration initiatives.

Rajiv Ramachandran first joined Prolifics as a Consultant, and is currently the Practice Director for Enterprise Integration. He has 11 years experience in the IT field — 3 of those years at IBM working as a developer at its Object Technology Group and its Component Technology Competency Center in Bangalore. He was then an Architect implementing IBM WebSphere Solutions at Fireman’s Fund Insurance. Currently, he specializes in SOA and IBM’s SOA-related technologies and products. An author at the IBM developerWorks community, Rajiv has been a presenter at IMPACT and IBM's WebSphere Services Technical Conference.

IBM Mashup Center

Niral Jhaveri, User Experience Practice Manager

The Web 2.0 world has evolved, and has evolved considerably. It’s no longer about getting data from the universe of information -- but collaborating, publishing, sharing and deriving business intelligence from the data. The landscape of information now consists of smaller fragments of relevant data commonly known as mashups.

So when a bank searches its database for a customer, it no longer expects to get the name of the customer. But instead expects to get back a data grid of all the accounts linked to the customer, a pie chart showing all the different asset holdings (equities, loans etc), a Google map showing the address of the customer and any relevant alerts on the customer account. And that’s not it -- all the information should be seen on a single unified page! Think it’s difficult? With IBM® Mashup Center, you can access the components that you need to create Web 2.0 mashup and application solutions.

What is a Mashup?
Mashups are situational applications which aggregate disparate data. Mashups add a lot of value by associating data elements that are relevant for the users.

With Mashup Center, you can

• Create situational apps which are reusable assets
• Facilitate rapid development of dynamic web applications (widgets)
• Create feeds from numerable data sources
• Empower business users to create and share mashup applications, widgets, feeds, and services
• Provide business intelligence by associating the data elements.
  

The Architecture



Key Components

Catalog: The catalog is a repository. All feed, feed mashup, and widget information is kept in the catalog.

Widget: A widget is a miniature application that is embedded within an HTML page. With a widget, dynamic content is displayed on the page.

Feed: A feed contains XML data. RSS, Atom and XML feeds are available on the Internet. An example of an RSS feed is the top news stories from Yahoo!, available at http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories. Feeds in MashupHub can be created using different data sources and then accessed via a URL.

Page: A page is a collection of widgets and other HTML markup that can be displayed in a Web browser. A page can be a mashup application or a regular Web page.

Why should your business use Mashup Center?

Mashup Center is a great tool for rapid assembly of dynamic web applications. The Mashup pages provide a lightweight web solution that combine application and information to solve many different business needs. Around the inter-web there is a fair amount of interest in mashups and many perceive it as better medium.

Mashups provide a user interface to data from variable sources (or feeds) like Web services, enterprise databases, spreadsheets, even BI warehouses like Cognos. Portability is a valuable add-on provided by Mashup Center. Development and product teams can build mashup pages/widgets and easily expose it to any intranet, internet or enterprise portals (even to Microsoft Share point).

With IBM Mashup Center business stakeholders get the freedom to assemble applications that cater to their requirements. Business users can combine, transform and reuse the mashups to create visualizations and provide real-time collaboration.

Mashup wiring enables you to collaborate data for a more unique, dynamic interface. So let’s say for example, a map widget can be wired to several feeds like real estate listing, company address, customer listing, hotels and restaurants. You can also wire the customer listing to its stock prices, relevant market news for the customer etc. You get the idea. Wiring widgets is extremely intuitive and easy to use.

Mashups and WebSphere Portal
Mashups are usually meant for creating applications which are developed in a very short time to target a very specific business problem. It is generally recommended to develop mashups when flexibility and time-to-develop applications is more important than governance and traditional development model provided by WebSphere Portal.

Pre built widgets (like graphs, reports, Google Gadgets) make Mashups more suitable for visualization and aggregation of data from different data sources on a single screen. However for a more transactional based enterprise system, WebSphere Portal is much better suited.

Style of development for portlets and mashups is also different. Widgets can be developed using different tools and have a relatively small and a generic code base. Feeds can be developed visually or by writing native SQL. Developing portlets require a more structured model by incorporating one or more design patterns and/or frameworks (Struts, JSF etc).

WebSphere Portal provides a much broader set of features like Virtual Portal, SSO, Content Management, Collaboration, advanced security model on Pages, Portlets and resources, Portal search, impersonation. These set of features are key differentiators between the WebSphere Portal and Mashup Center.

Mashup applications can run along side or within the portal framework, it all depends on the solution designed. WebSphere Portal 6.1.5 provides the ability to render Mashup Pages and widgets within the portal container. At the same time, Mashup Center can render any Portal page by providing the appropriate URL for that page.

An Example of a Customer Dashboard Mashup

Niral Jhaveri was most recently a Senior Consultant at Prolifics and has extensive expertise in the IBM Lotus, WebSphere and Rational family of products. He has played a key role at several strategic clients by providing technical leadership. Niral has an extensive background in the design and development of IBM WebSphere Portal, SOA and Web 2.0 applications with a proven track record of consulting and architecting solutions for several industry verticals like Finance, Retail, Insurance and Technology.