On 16 Mar, 2009 By mpm With 4 Comments
Today, I was reading up on what the Plone community has done with integrating their CMS with Salesforce.com. I am thinking that this might be a good model for how we can do it with Drupal, but that's a subject for another post. (from Plone/SF Integration group) There's a good overview of the integration on the developerforce wiki. There are 5 components to the integration:
  • a couple of toolkits that provide the basic back-and-forth between Plone and Salesforce.com (they talk to Python and Zope)
  • an auth plug-in that allows for Salesforce.com objects to be Plone users, credential checking, caching of user data, and syncing of data from Salesforce.com and Plone
  • an integration of PloneFormGen with Salesforce.com for web-to-lead forms, etc.
  • an event management product that connects with Salesforce.com
  • A PayPal integration product
This is a pretty robust set of channels for data to move back and forth from Salesforce.com to Plone. There is a Plone/Salesforce.com Integration group, that keeps working on this, and a number of organization, including ONE/Northwest, have invested huge amounts of time and resources to working on this integration. This is, for sure, one of the most robust open source CMS to CRM integrations out there, and one that seems to be getting pretty close to providing very powerful integration "out-of-the-box" - instead of having to piece things together and do customized code, which is more common than not. I haven't gotten my hands on this to try (not being a Plone person, I doubt I will), but folks might want to talk in comments about how straightforward the integration is, given differences in data for different instances of Salesforce.com. I don't know how much code tweaking is required to really get this going. But in any event, it's great that it exists, and it's a great benchmark for CMS/CRM integration.