A bit over a year ago, I wrote a post about the status of Drupal/Salesforce Integration. I figured it was time to do an update. At the moment, if you want to integrate Drupal and Salesforce, you have three options:

1. Use the contributed modules (or have a developer install and configure them for you).
2. Use Jackson River's Springboard.
3. Roll your own (or have a developer roll your own for you.)

I'm going to talk in much detail about #1 in a bit. I've not had any experience with Springboard, but it's important to understand that it is not open source, and is only maintained by one shop. That is going to be an inherent weakness - no matter what. I don't know enough about it to match it to the contributed modules, but it's hard to imagine that it's possible for it to keep up, given the nature of open source development. All of that said, it's supposed to be an interesting all-in-one sort of option, so it's probably worth a look. Rolling your own is always a precarious proposition. I frankly can't imagine much of a situation where  it would be preferable to modifying what's available and contributing the mods back. So what is the status of the Drupal modules? Right now, there is an alpha release for Drupal 6, which is alpha in that very humble open source sense - it's being used in quite a number of production sites. It includes some great stuff. You can see an overview here, in the slide deck for a talk given at NTC last week, which compares the integration of Salesforce with 3 of the big open source CMS platforms, Plone, Drupal, and Joomla. There are four major projects:

• Salesforce Suite, which includes:
  • The API - the core module that does the communicating with the Salesforce API
  • Contrib - a module that provides support for import/export from contributed modules
  • Export Queue (experimental) for queuing exports
  • Import - importing data from SF
  • Match - for matching objects before creating new ones
  • Node - for linking Drupal nodes to SF objects
  • Notifications (experimental, sort of - it's worked quite well for me) - allowing Drupal to handle SF outbound messages
  • User - matching users to SF objects
• Salesforce/Ubercart - provides integration for Ubercart. Uses the Salesforce Suite API
• Salesforce Feeds - allows for feeding SF records into Drupal via Feeds. Also uses the Salesforce Suite API
• Salesforce Webform - Allows for passing data from a Drupal Webform to Salesforce. Currently does not use the Salesforce Suite API, and cannot be used on the same site as the Salesforce Suite, but hopefully that will change soon.

All of these modules are actively maintained, there is an active base of folks using and contributing (including me) and there are plans afoot for Drupal 7, with big improvements. Of course, there are still some snaggy spots, and it helps if you know some about Salesforce to have this work really well, but I've gotten good results doing two-way sync of user and node data with the Salesforce Suite, as well as used the Salesforce Feeds module some. If you use Salesforce, want integration, and are pondering a CMS choice, definitely check out the overview slides. If you are using Drupal, want integration, and considering a CRM, definitely consider Salesforce. And if you are already using both, and looking to find ways to integrate them, drop me a line, I can either directly help you, or point you in the direction of folks who can.