Editor’s note: This post was updated on June 1, 2023, with the latest information and resources.
When you implement Salesforce (or take over an existing implementation), you often need to integrate Salesforce with other systems. In this blog, we’ll discuss what integration means, why customers choose to use integration tools, and how you can get started with integration. Keep reading for our introductory guide to the tools available as well as an overview to help you explore the right integration solution for you.
When we talk about integration, it means to create a connection between a specific Salesforce instance and another database or system. The connection can be inbound, outbound, or bi-directional, and you may be connecting to another database, another Salesforce instance, or another cloud-based data source. Integrations might focus on sharing data between systems or continuing a business process automation from one system to another.
Salesforce is a very powerful tool because it helps companies create a 360-degree view of their customers and their business. Integrations with additional databases can bring even more value and information to your Salesforce environment. As Salesforce Admins, we can make important data accessible to our end users, and we’re often in the position to make decisions about which integrations would benefit our company. Here are some of the most common use cases for integration.
A very common integration use case is exposing data from an external system inside of your Salesforce environment. This approach can help establish Salesforce as the single source of truth for your company data.
Although this use case sounds similar to the one above, it’s slightly different. You may want to centralize your user experience on Salesforce, but not import and manage that data inside of Salesforce. In this use case, your users can be informed and act on records from other systems, without the data management overhead of importing and managing potential data replication issues.
In this use case, you’re developing and executing complex queries on Salesforce data. With the power and flexibility of the Salesforce Platform, many customers are able to accomplish data transformation with fewer resource demands.
Consolidate your data from Salesforce and external systems for comprehensive analytics. In this use case, you may want to centralize all of your data onto Salesforce and use Salesforce tools to augment and manage your data.
Some of our customers have many Salesforce environments and want to consolidate the data for consistency across channels—and build custom apps and experiences that leverage all of their Salesforce data.
This use case is applicable if you have a collection of disconnected cloud and/or on-premise systems that need to share data with one another. There are data integration use cases across systems that do not include Salesforce; however, the tools we highlight below focus on solutions for Salesforce integrations.
For scalable integration patterns that will grow with your data structure, some customers leverage an event-driven architecture to integrate across their systems. When events in one system take place, other relevant systems should be able to immediately recognize those events and carry out subsequent actions, such as updating a case or restocking inventory.
In this scenario, there’s a business need to make your Salesforce data or processes available to external or third-party systems.
Now that we’ve identified some of the business use cases for integration, and what integration means, let’s identify the tools you can choose from. There are several alternatives and choices available—this list is meant to provide some initial guidance on which tools to explore for your use case.
Many of these tools can be used together to design a complete integration solution for your business use case. Some integration solutions do require programmatic development initially; however, they can often be extended within Salesforce with declarative tools, like Flow.
Salesforce Admins are at the heart of the user experience. You build pages, apps, data structures, automation, analytics, and more to bring your users the business processes and data they need to be successful. Integration design follows many of the same principles you’ve mastered as an admin: Discovery, Documentation, Innovation, and Collaboration. Take the first step by learning more about Salesforce integration solutions and how they help you build immersive experiences for your users.
Watch the Trailhead LIVE Episode for more information on how to get started.
What are Invocable Composer Flows? MuleSoft Composer is an integration tool designed for admins, business analysts, marketers, salespeople, and team leaders. Using Composer, you can quickly and easily build flows to integrate systems and data and automate integration tasks. It’s a no-code tool you can use to build automations with only clicks. To further supercharge […]
MuleSoft Composer is the fastest and easiest way to connect apps and data for business teams, in partnership with IT. With the long-awaited error handling feature that Muleys are excited about, you can build more robust and resilient automation. You can further automate your flows, get real-time notifications on failures, mark failed records for reprocessing, […]
Are you tired of waiting for IT resources to build out an integration to your supplier? Are you frustrated that your payroll system lacks reliable application programming interface (API) documentation, leaving your IT team to weed through JSON and just hoping it’ll work? Then Flow HTTP Callout is for you! This feature does the hard […]
