Drupal and Salesforce

Submitted by mpm on

It's taken me a while to write this blog post, mostly because I have been working hard at various things (like building a business and building new websites.) This is the last installment in my CRM/CMS integration series, that started almost a year ago (wow!) And I'm skipping Joomla/Salesforce Integration because there isn't any publicly available documentation or code about the integration that PICnet did with Joomla and Salesforce, called J!Salesforce.  [update: see Ryan's comment below.] So what is the state of Drupal/Salesforce Integration? It's not as mature as the Plone/Salesforce integration, for sure, but it is coming along nicely. There are several contributed modules:
  • salesforce - main module, with API, node, and user integration possibilities. This module provides the basic salesforce API connection (via SOAP), and includes field mapping, and basic import/export
  • sf_webform - Makes integration with webforms in Drupal fairly easy. Web-to-lead is quite nice and flexible with this module.
  • uc_salesforce - Provides integration with ubercart orders
  • parser-salesforce - Integration with FeedAPI - pulling data from salesforce into drupal nodes via FeedAPI  (I hope to start maintaining this module)
  • sf_import - Import Salesforce objects into Drupal nodes (will be folded into the main salesforce module)
All of these modules are in alpha or beta, although I know for a fact that some of them (or versions of them) are working in production sites. There are a fair number of bugs that need to be fixed before there is a stable release. There are a bunch of outstanding issues that need a lot of work (like caching, for instance). There are two other modules that are related, but don't use the main salesforce api module - one for ubercart, and one for web-to-lead (called salesforcewebform). That module has a stable release, but only provides the ability to integrate between Webforms and leads, not other objects. Right now, the salesforce module allows for integration of contact, lead and campaign objects only. so that's another big area that could use some work. There is a good screencast done by one of the folks (Jeff Miccolis from Development Seed) who has worked a lot on this project. I'd say that in a year, we'll have a good solid module release, providing lots of features for integration between Drupal and Salesforce.com.

Comments

Great to hear you'll be

Great to hear you'll be working hard on this integration between Salesforce.com and Drupal, it's definitely a felt need in the marketplace. We at PICnet have been happily including our Joomla - Salesforce.com integration (aptly named J!Salesforce) in Non-Profit Soapbox for a few months now, and during the past two months have been providing it as a downloadable product as part of our general sales.

In the meantime, I'll shoot you an email with our documentation while we wrap up our new Web site promoting it publicly (all our sales now have been through word of mouth/email).

Again, great to see this coming to Drupal!

Good article im actually

Good article im actually trying to find out if there is a module or if one of the above mentioned modules will allow ubercart to read the products details in salesforce and auto populate ubercart with products ? Do you know if this is possible, rather than doing it a manual way such as importing and exporting a csv file ? Thanks.

Hi mitch, From what I know

Hi mitch,

From what I know of the current status of the Ubercart/SF integration it is definitely UC Order -> SF record kind of sync. That said - ubercart products are just Drupal content types, and there is a salesforce -> Drupal import module in the mix, which could do the trick for you.

All the modules above seem to

All the modules above seem to need the API access on Salesforce. Salesforce only allows access to it for Enterprise or Unlimited Editions....

Are there any modules that integrate to the current web-to-lead system in Salesforce?

Not that I know of, but it's

Not that I know of, but it's actually not hard to do in Drupal - you don't really need a module. Just use an input filter that allows for full HTML, and drop the code you can get from salesforce.com into that page, and it will work fine.

Might be time to update your

Might be time to update your post. I was involved in the salesforcewebform module that you mentioned and it has added the ability to create other objects now. It's been a while since that feature was added, but I can understand how it would be missed.

Good article, might run through and do an update though. Thanks!

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