Posted by franscud on January 26, 2010 at 11:01pm
I'm doing some research on the various CMS options out there that integrate with SalesForce. What I'd like is a CMS that can be hosted outside the Force servers (so Force Sites isn't really an option), but that allows both pushing and pulling information to/from the SF database.
Plone claims to be pretty well integrated, but because of its architecture and the fact that it requires special hosting, it's not really a good option. So, I was wondering how the Drupal Salesforce module compares, and whether it would allow the creation of dynamic pages that could include lists of Events or Volunteer opportunities, for example, pulled from the SF database.
Comments
Work in progress
The Plone folks have quite a head start on the drupal folks in terms of integration. In general, there's a lot good about what is available for Drupal in terms of integration, but there is a lot of work to be done.
Check out the Salesforce project page.
We have a series of sites
We have a series of sites running on a custom branch (we forked around the first release ~ 9 months ago or so) of the drupal salesforce modules. I can't speak to what can and can't be accomplished with the current community contrib modules, but the core work was enough to give us a jumping off point...I imagine there's been a lot of work done since then.
Our custom branch has several features that the contrib modules didn't (at the time, maybe they do now?):
* automated import of SF data to nodes and an interface to control the criteria of which SF objects are candidates for import
* an interface to manage business rules around how data is handled between the two systems (useful in bi-directional syncs where one system is the master of one set of fields while the other is the master of another set of fields)
* ubercart transaction integration (this is very specific to fundraising and the SF NPSP, but it can be adapted to serve other purposes)
* record type assignment based on drupal user role
* optimization and batching of api calls
* additional error handling and reporting
* lots of other tweaks big and small to cover client use cases and integration issues
We have integrations that have been up and running since last June, crossing multiple use cases (nodes, users, donations, webform submissions, etc), and hundreds of thousands of API calls. Our experience has been that these two platforms are easily adaptable and integratableand that the core drupal salesforce modules are definitely enough to get you started, and might even be enough to do the job.