Salesforce

Hi, has anyone written an interface to Salesforce using the API?

Not jet, but doing SF administration work right now and know I will have to interact with SF database shortly. Have a look at the mass of plugins written for- and within SF.

Thanks Joost. The gotcha is that to access the SF database you have to have an Enterprise account (very expensive) whereas my project is using a Professional account that still has some API access but it is restricted. May of the plugins/APPs require an Enterprise account and don’t work on Professional.

Salesforce is a great product but does everything it can to get you onto an Enterprise account by restricting what you can do on a Professional :frowning:

Hi Nathan, I work with the Enterprise edition, but still don’t understand why SF is so restricted and expensive. Always thought that companies chose for cloud solutions because they don’t want to deal with maintenance etc. Well, practice turns out that companies need to invest in a close connection with a good administrator because SF needs a lot of attention to get it customized and keep it working. Every month I see a lot of changes initiated by the SF company which have to be followed up.
As a user I think SF is too flexible and complex due to that. Every simple action takes a lot of mouseclicks and next to that, it’s quite slow in it’s complex screen-building. I am now slowly learning APEX in order to build connections and exports.

In addition every app you want to add is user based licence so you end up spending a fortune on little extras. We have just stated to use Cases and I could not believe it when I found out that Knowledge is an extra eg Canned Replies and at $60 per user per month this is just way too much for a small business (11 of us).

I too was thinking about learning APEX but now realise I need to get my head around the basics first.

One thing I was thinking and haven’t yet looked at, but was to see if it might be possible to create a Xojo app that lives on the internet that is called when triggers or things happen within SF. The Xojo app could then do all the magic I need and pass back the information or call out to other services. For example we want to have it so that when an Opportunity gets to a specific stage in SF then we create a Project in Quickbooks, a Project in Harvest and as an account in our own internal system.

Not sure if the above is even possible or even possible in Professional version of SF.

Its profitable
SAP proved that long before SF came along

It’s maybe worth having a look at https://github.com/ccoenraets. He’s got some excellent examples of integrations that are possible with the Salesforce platform.

[quote=480176:@Norman Palardy]Its profitable
SAP proved that long before SF came along[/quote]

SAP, SalesForce etc. are just not interested in small companies .
I am introduced in this area now, and I now believe small companies don’t need SAP, SalesForce etc.

Do you have clients using those?

I have consulted on SAP (not for SAP) for the last 24 years. I implemented SAP in the mid-market as well as with very large clients. On the low end of the spectrum, companies in the 50 M CAD annual volume. To say that SAP is just not interested in smaller companies is not completely accurate. OK, 50M is not exactly small, but compared to multi-billion dollar multi-national companies typically implementing the mastodont ERP, it is very small. Smaller than that, the issue is not that SAP is not interested, but rather that it requires more maintenance than smaller companies have resources. Below a certain point, the cost is simply too high and the benefits not sufficient to justify the implementation of SAP. It is better to select a smaller package and there are very good smaller packages available. I have not worked with SAP BusinessbyDesign offering, but it is clearly targeted at the SMB market to compete with smaller competitive packages. Again, I suspect that the sweet spot is probably 50M and up, but this is not based on actual experience and I could easily be proved wrong here.

The SAP database (pre-HANA) is not per se closed, but finding your way through the 80 000+ tables, cluster tables etc. can be daunting if one does not have an outstanding knowledge of the data structure underlying the specific module one tries to interface with. It is generally safer (and strongly recommended) to interface with services developed within SAP. This is something that the client SAP COE members should be able to do for us.

Yes, I have one and one optional. They allow me to train myself on the job and get certified by following courses.