{"id":10363,"date":"2021-01-20T08:00:21","date_gmt":"2021-01-20T16:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/softwareengineeringdaily.com\/?p=10363"},"modified":"2021-01-19T19:26:19","modified_gmt":"2021-01-20T03:26:19","slug":"salesforce-as-a-data-source","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/softwareengineeringdaily.com\/2021\/01\/20\/salesforce-as-a-data-source\/","title":{"rendered":"Salesforce as a Data Source"},"content":{"rendered":"

Salesforce AppExchange. <\/span>Source<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Salesforce is the most popular Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool in the world, with <\/span>19.5% of the market share of CRM solutions in 2018<\/span><\/a>. CRM platforms offer a centralized system to deal with company and customer relationships, including potential customers. Salesforce solutions encompass customer service, marketing, sales, digital commerce, and more.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Salesforce is a powerful ecosystem that brings together all the capabilities any marketing, sales, or customer service team may require on the daily. What makes Salesforce even more powerful is its flexibility and extendability. Besides its comprehensive marketplace of apps that Salesforce can be integrated with, called <\/span>AppExchange<\/span><\/a>, Salesforce provides secure and extensive products and APIs to integrate with any service that you might need.<\/span><\/p>\n

One such widely used service is the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering <\/span>Heroku<\/span><\/a>. As a leading cloud application platform, Heroku takes away the complexity of running, deploying and managing applications, allowing your team to focus on developing the integral parts. Heroku provides the shortest path from idea to working application, whether you are developing a prototype or a business-critical feature. Being a Salesforce company, Heroku integrates seamlessly with Salesforce.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Connecting Salesforce with customer-facing Heroku applications. <\/span>Source<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

In what scenarios would you want to integrate Heroku with Salesforce?<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the main reasons is using Salesforce as a data source, and using Heroku as a means of building applications leveraging Salesforce data. Product data, customer data, or analytical insights gained from Salesforce can be integrated into customer-facing applications. Using Salesforce as a data source, you can build low-latency, high-throughput applications on Heroku to serve your customers. For example, imagine that you are running a second-hand book store online. The records of the books that you\u2019re selling, along with customer information are stored in Salesforce, while the web application is served with Heroku. Your customer-facing Heroku web platform can leverage product and customer records from Salesforce, while also registering customer actions back into Salesforce for further analysis by marketing and sales teams.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Source: <\/span>Heroku Connect (salesforce.com)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

How can you do this as a Salesforce user? The answer lies in <\/span>Heroku Connect<\/span><\/a>. This service offers uni- or bi-directional synchronization between Salesforce and <\/span>Heroku Postgres<\/span><\/a>, Heroku\u2019s managed SQL Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) offering. Utilizing data from Salesforce becomes as easy as querying your Heroku Postgres using simple SQL. Since Heroku Postgres is physically closer to your Heroku application, querying is faster and latency is lower. Using an out-of-the-box solution like Heroku Connect removes the need to manually sync data between your CRM system and your customer interface, saving precious developer time.<\/span><\/p>\n

The process of connecting Salesforce and Heroku Postgres via Heroku Connect is highly customizable:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n