Archive for the ‘Integration’ Category
If This Then Salesforce
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.
Announcing the Salesforce Handbook
Recently, Jeff Douglas and I saw the potential for a beginner’s book – aimed at business owners, analysts and developers, that comprehensively documents Salesforce and Force.com. There is a tonne of documentation out there and we thought “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a handbook that lightly summarised the most important areas of the platforms as well as offering some best practise advice”. We mulled it over for a time, and today we’d like to announce that we’re currently writing:
The Salesforce Handbook
A newcomer’s guide to building applications on Salesforce.com and the Force.com Platform.
Hand-in-hand with the book we’ll be publishing content from the book on a WordPress site. Here you can expect to find excerpts from the book, but also content that supplements the book e.g. areas that’ll serve as best-practice hubs with links to official documentation, blog posts that rock the party, and even superb discussion forum threads.
We’d love to get your feedback on the book as it progresses, but for now you can checkout the announcement and let us know what you think of the idea.
Salesforce API Integration Using SOAP-based Web Services
Too Much Documentation (TMD) - The leading cause of baldness amongst men.
There are several tomes & tools to help you integrate with the platform; this article will concentrate on WSDL defined web services. Some help texts are specific to certain languages, others favour certain approaches but I’ve found there’s no short-and-sweet guide. As someone who’s nearly drowned in the documentation (including forums, tweets and blogs) I thought I’d try to save – at least some of you – the white-squall that is ‘Learning the basics of SFDC WSDL-based integration’.
I’ll be the first to admit that summarising such a broad topic can be difficult, so if I do miss anything out, y’all out there in the community just let me know. Read the rest of this entry »
The Silver Lining 