The Silver Lining

I’ve been enjoying IFTTT for a while now and if you haven’t experimented with it yet then I’m not sure we’ll ever be friends. Essentially it’s a very easy tool that lets you set triggers on a source API e.g. Foursquare and have some information from that API be posted to a target API e.g. Jawbone Up. IFTTT calls these recipes and I’d like to demonstrate some particularly delicious combinations that can be used with Chatter.

Salesforce Org Alerts and Known Issue posted to Chatter

Salesforce makes Instance Alerts e.g. “Perfomance degradation on EU0.” available through an RSS feed so all you need to do is create a recipe (or copy mine) that monitors the appropriate RSS url for changes and posts to a particular Chatter group.

You can do a similar thing with Salesforce Known Issues.

Tweets posted to Chatter

Quite often there are interesting tweets that I want to share with a particular group on Chatter. One of the recipes I’ve created in this class uses the hashtag #tqcd to push a particular tweet to our “Development” Chatter group.

We also have more than a few Reid Carlberg fans in Tquila so we have a recipe that shares his tweets to a dedicated group in our Org. His tweets are mostly about facial hair at the moment but who am I to judge genius.

Limitations

At this point Chatter can only be used as a target system in any recipe but I’m hoping they’ll change that in future.

Best Practices

So far I’ve established two guidelines:

• Create a separate Chatter group for recipes that will be executed often. This gives people the option to opt-out of those posts.
• If possible create a separate Salesforce user to post on Chatter. This will reduce the number of explicit posts you making it easier for others to find information in your feed.

You can find all these recipes on my IFTT profile. There are quite a few other interesting recipes regarding Salesforce on the IFTTT website but I’m hoping that you’ll be inspired to think of new creative ways to use the tool. If you do please let me know in a comment below or on Twitter.