How to Integrate Salesforce with Third-Party Apps

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• How to Integrate Salesforce with Third-Party Apps
• Salesforce brings a huge opportunity for
  businesses who want to stay ahead of their
  competition by way of better CRM, product
  delivery and running other marketing programs.
  All these activities, however, become very
  challenging if the business has limitations of
  budget and time. Salesforce has proven its mark
  on an international stage by being successfully
  able to handle all these challenges with ease
  owing to its non- intrusive and scalable
  platform. Thus, to completely leverage various
  uses of Salesforce, the businesses have to
  integrate the same to the customer-facing
  business processes. Thus, the question of
  integrating Salesforce with third-party systems
  like ERP, databases, etc. has become very
  challenging for various businesses.
• Process of Integration
• Preparation and Planning This is the most
  important phase in which you have to decide the
  goals of the integration. It is important for you
  to know the answers of the questions like the
  kind of data that needs an extraction, what data
  needs to be backed up, is it important to have
  the data of Salesforce to be backed-up, etc. In
  case if you consider manual coding also you will
  need to consider both the time and effort which
  are needed to learn the APIs. Latter gives
  connectivity to both the source and target, to
  write the logic of transformation, etc. Thus,
  your goals should be very clear and the success
  of the integration will depend on the clarity of
  your goals as a lack of clear strategic vision is
  one of the primary goals.
• Connection Maintenance at the Data Source To
  start reading the source data, you will have to
  develop connections with the source database.
  Thus, you will need to have got access to data
  tables, data structures, and data entries. This
  actually marks the starting point of data
  integration. In case if you make use of visual
  tools like Apatar, then you can do it comfortably
  without having to write a single word of code. A
  possible gap could be that the integration of the
  data is not detailed and it also lacks a lot of
  data sources which are used to make decisions.
  Otherwise, the application is ready to operate
  the data.

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• Staging Usage of Database Although this step is
  optional but can definitely be considered
  especially if you need to apply intricate data
  cleansing or the enrichment rules as your data
  travels from the source to the target. E.g., you
  may want to bring together data from more than
  one source like news from RSS feed, fetch
  information from the GoldMine CRM, verify emails,
  names, etc., combine all this into the
  Salesforce.com account. E.g. if you use MySQL for
  hosting stage data you will have to connect
  MySQL database while using the MySQL connector.
  This can be done by making use of the
  drag-and-drop the connector to the work panel of
  Apatar, then entering the details of database
  authentication and providing paths to MySQL. A
  possible mistake could be improper validation or
  duplication of data.

• Mapping the Source with Destination It is a
  known fact that most developers spend the
  majority of their time on building bridges
  between different applications. It is possible
  for even not so tech-savvy users to be able to
  integrate data between systems, databases and
  other kinds of applications. Apatar is one such
  visual tool which lets its users to create the
  DataMaps and link the data between its source
  and sink. This helps to schedule both one-time
  and repeating data transformations. All these
  can also be saved for re-use in the future.

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• Issue of Salesforce.com IDs There are some
  tables in Salesforce.com which are related by
  way of some IDs, e.g. Account table, Contact
  table, etc. The IDs are automatically generated.
  Problems arise when the data integration
  specialist actually has to fill both the tables
  at one time. This can be worked around by using
  Salesforce.com connectors, e.g. configuring one
  connector for the Account table and another for
  the Contact table in Salesforce.com. Then one has
  to map all the so-called nodes together. This
  will cause the Salesforce.com IDs wot be
  generated in the connector which is configured
  for the Account table where the names of the
  customer company are stored.

Conclusion Thus, it is possible and at times
essential to integrate Salesforce with multiple
third- party systems ERP, databases. Etc. This
is essential for fully utilizing all the
capabilities of Salesforce. Reference-
https//thementalclub.com/how-to-integrate-salesfo
rce-with-third-party- apps-31073