Scribe Software Blog

Considering a new Cloud CRM System? Software Advice offers their insights.

If you're considering a new Cloud CRM system, here's an interesting perspective from Lauren Carlson, of Software Advice. Her article shares the top 5 Cloud CRM applications she believes are worth consideration before you make your decision where to go in the cloud.

The Five Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform – 4. Supportability

Last time I discussed the need for easy transferability of the ongoing management of integration solutions from development to production. I will now discuss the fourth capability essential to a collaborative integration platform, Supportability.

Moving an integration process into production introduces the same set of challenges as moving any application or solution out of QA into production. Users always use application in ways that were not contemplated by the original integration design, resulting in unexpected errors and exceptions. Modifying the design of the end point applications after the integration is implemented may disrupt the integration processes. Changes to the overall IT environment may interrupt connections between the various applications. In short, business happens and things stop working or not work as intended. Your integration approach should include a robust set of error detection, diagnosis and remediation tools.

Is there a way to proactively monitor the health of the integration and raise alerts when things are not functioning properly? Are there meaningful execution and error logs that enable someone to quickly identify the root cause of any issue? Does the integration process have built in re-try mechanisms that address any timing issues (for example, attempting to process an order transaction before the related customer record has been created in your target application)?

A major area to consider with any integration solution is the ability to handle gracefully upgrades to your business applications. For example, if a customer moves from Dynamics CRM 4.0 to Dynamics CRM 2011, what will the impact be on the integration? Is the upgrade simply a testing exercise where things for the large part continue to work or does it require a re-write of the integration? The best integration solutions create an abstraction layer between the integration processes themselves and the API of the endpoint applications. The process only sees the abstracted interface and when the endpoint application is upgraded, it is simply a matter of modifying the interface between the API and the abstraction layer. If you are looking at 3^rd party adapter products, make sure you interrogate this question fully. You will be glad you did later.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the integration approach needs to be very reliable. In other words, "It just needs to work". The best integration is one that no one ever knows about or notices (of course, until it stops working and then it gets a lot of attention). Integration solutions that are not rock solid are disruptive and costly to your business as well a significant drain on your resources. Users may not trust the data they are looking at and go to other methods that may be more time consuming and costly to the business. They may stop using the CRM system all together and cobble their own "system" which completely defeats the purpose of your CRM implementation and integration. Your resources that could be on other, more important projects are now working on fixing that integration – again.

In the next and final installment, I conclude with a discussion of the need for expandability.

The 5 Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform – 2. Flexibility

This is the next installment of the posts I started in April about the key capabilities of a collaborative integration platform. It has been over a month since I blogged about the first in the series about Reusability. Things got a bit away from me over the last five weeks but I hope to pick up the pace. So here it goes. The second big capability is Flexibility.

Flexibility

Integration requires a flexible approach. There are infinite varieties of integration needs as there are customers and business systems. One key driver of this variability is industry. The integration processes across different vertical markets can be dramatically different. Take for example, the integration of an order process between CRM and ERP in a distribution company versus a capital goods manufacturer. The integration for the distribution company is going to very transaction intensive with paramount emphasis on ensuring that the sales and services teams have up to date information on the location and delivery schedules of goods, while the capital goods manufacturer will likely focus on leveraging back office data about their customers to up-sell and cross-sell additional products and services. Integration processes can also vary greatly within industries based on differences in business models from company to company. A simple example is the difference between a direct selling and a channel selling organization.

Typical areas of variability in integration design include:

• The data design of each business application involved and the transformations needed to resolve the design differences between those business applications,
• The rules of data ownership: which system is the master of what data; which systems can insert or update certain records or fields; etc.,
• The actions that trigger integration events and the rules to process those integrations.

Beware of pre-packaged integration solutions, particularly around this issue of flexibility. They may seem a lot easier to implement, but may not give the user close to what their business requires. Even if a customer can take advantage of a pre-packaged integration solution, the solution will almost always require modification to address the customer's needs. These changes can range from minimal to extensive depending on how unique the business requirements are.

Custom code to achieve integration has a major advantage where it offers unlimited flexibility to meet a customer's needs. There is no limit to what can be accomplished provided that one has the resources with the skills and time necessary. The downside is cost in people, time, and money including the initial cost of the implementing the integration project and the ongoing costs of supporting and modifying the integration over time. The cost of custom code is always more expensive and can be out of reach for some customers. For many customers, the right answer is a third party integration tool that combines a graphical user interface, templates for common integration scenarios, and significant depth of configuration capabilities. An integration tool gives customers to the ability get exactly what they need while significantly reducing (or in some cases, eliminating) the costs and complexity of a custom coded integration.

Next up…Transferability.

 

Introducing the 5 Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform

In my previous blog post, I spoke of the changing role of the partner brought on by the advent of cloud computing. In this new world, partners are moving away from a reliance on 'systems integration' and moving towards creating value-added industry focused solutions. A critical component to these solutions is the need to help companies make sense of the integration requirements to other business applications and data sources. When developing an integration approach, it is important to recognize the different and evolving roles between the partner and customer throughout the phases of an application deployment. Even if there isn't a partner involved, in many cases IT organizations act in a similar capacity as partner to the business to deliver a successful CRM project. A collaborative approach to integration between "partner" and "customer" best serves the integration needs of companies deploying these business applications.

It is rare that one person has all of the skills and knowledge necessary to fully implement an integration solution. In a CRM integration project for example, the development of the integration requires a solid understanding of the design of the CRM system and the key customer processes that drive the integration need. It also requires detailed knowledge of the other applications, many of them complex back office applications. The ability to allow multiple people to participate in the development and design of the integration solution in a coordinated manner is essential. Each of the parties should be able to design their discrete piece and simply fold it into the broader solution. The other members of the project team should be able to easily understand the work others have done and should be able add their input and comments. Team members that have moved onto other projects should be able to easily move back into an active role.

So beyond these team development capabilities what does a collaborative approach to integration really mean? Over the new few weeks I will be exploring the 5 capabilities of a collaborative integration platform. This exploration should shed some light on the direction we are headed with our new integration platform, Scribe Online, as well as some of the continued investments we will be making in Scribe Insight. So watch for my next post as we drill down on the first capability; Reusability.

Salesforce.com to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Migration Template

We now have a template that will help you migrate data from Salesforce.com to Microsoft Dynamics CRM version 4 or version 2011. The template takes care of the basics of account, lead, and activity data.

Here is a list of the data the template migrates.

• Account records
• Contact records
• Activity records
• Un-converted Leads
• Attachments

When the template runs, it creates key cross reference relationships for the primary IDs for accounts, contacts, and leads. With the graphical environment in the Scribe Workbench it should be relatively easy to extend the template to handle other types of data related to these three objects, or to other objects.

You can learn more about the template and how to implement it by watching this tutorial video or by reading the template guide. The guide has more details about the template including the field mappings. You can download the template from the Samples section of our template download page.

User Conference Session: Scribe Adapter for Salesforce - may the force be with you!

 Fellow Scribers - I’ve been a Technical Pre-sales Engineer here for the past 3.5 years, and am thrilled we’re holding our very first 2010 Scribe User Conference here in Bedford, NH on September 23^rd and 24^th.  If you’ve ever visited New England in late September or early October, you know that this is our “leaf peeping” season where one will be in awe of nature’s brilliant crimsons and golds of fall.  All of us here at Scribe will be as energized as the foliage colors, and look forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones. 

And now the rest of the story…

Has there been a time when you purchased a product, loaded with all the bells and whistles, and soon came to realize you only use a small subset of the total feature set available?  It’s not that you didn’t need all those features, but you have just become more at ease with the some more than others, right?  If you resemble this description, as I do, it’s time to travel over to the other side to the pathway of many abilities!  Journey with me and learn how you can leverage these robust “diamond in the rough” features to deliver even more value than you are currently experiencing.

In our session covering the Scribe Adapter for Salesforce, we will be discussing the detail of available features that are sometimes overlooked.  Features that can be very performance strategic when designing a migration project to populate your Salesforce deployment.  Features that will allow your integration processes to run more efficiently and at the same time minimizing your hit count against the Force.com web service.  We all know the results of maxing out on your available API hits, don’t we?

We will also be demonstrating a few use case scenarios (migration and integration) where you will see the Scribe Adapter for Salesforce in action.  Below is a sneak preview of our planned coming attractions:

1.    Support for multi-record “Upsert” operations to maximize performance.

2.    Support of data compression and multi-record bulk operations to maximize performance.

3.    Publishing data out of Salesforce by using Outbound Messaging.  This feature not only improves performance but also minimizes API hit count due to the fact that data is pushed out of SFDC, not pulled.

We feel that our session will be of significant and compelling content from which you can walk away feeling the force is with you.   Until we speak again, remember… A Scriber gains power through understanding!

Scribe Sales Order Component

Were you aware that Scribe provides a free custom application for Salesforce called the Scribe Sales Order Component? Salesforce out-of-the-box does not provide a full-fledged Sales Order entity. For many of our customers who integrate Salesforce to a backend ERP system such as Dynamics GP, converting opportunities to sales orders in Salesforce prior to synchronizing those orders into the ERP system represents a much more natural order flow – and this is precisely what the Scribe Sales Order Component provides.

The Scribe Sales Order Component is required for use with our Microsoft Dynamics GP to Salesforce integration template.  It provides the ability to convert opportunities to a custom sales order entity, and then view and maintain these sales orders.  Using Scribe Insight and the GP to Salesforce integration template, these orders are submitted to GP for processing.  The Scribe Sales Order Component also provides a Custom Dashboard and a set of reports to track orders placed in Salesforce.

 We have recently made a technology upgrade to Scribe Sales Order Component. The previous version of the Scribe Sales Order Component  was written using s-controls, which Salesforce recently announced are being discontinued. This new version of the Scribe Sales Order Component is based VisualForce pages and Apex classes to ensure our ability to expand and enhance the product in the future, consistent with Salesforce's technology roadmap. The new version of the Scribe Sales Order Component provides the exact same functionality as the prior version, albeit on Salesforce's new technology platform.

Customers using the previous Scribe Sales Order Component do not need to upgrade their component as Salesforce will continue to support s-controls for the foreseeable future. All new implementations wishing to use the Scribe Sales Order Component should utilize the latest version, available from the Salesforce AppExchange.

For more information on the Scribe Sales Order Component and how to install see: http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016ZMHEA2

Recorded Webcast: Using Scribe Insight to integrate Microsoft Dynamics NAV to Web Services, SharePoint and Salesforce.com

Scribe Insight is the ideal tool for connecting Dynamics NAV to your organization's data sources and applications. In this recorded webcast you will see demonstrations of integrations from Microsoft Dynamics NAV to Web Services, SharePoint and Salesforce.com

Click here to view the recorded webcast

Using Scribe Insight to import attachments in Dynamics CRM (Part 2 – SFDC to MSCRM)

Part two of this series (thanks Mark Perez) is more straightforward. After setting up a source connection to Salesforce.com that retrieves Attachment objects and a target Dynamics CRM connection that inserts annotation objects we need to map the document from Salesforce to Dynamics CRM, and also to set up all of the information that Dynamics CRM requires for inserting attachments.

Since the latter were covered in Part 1, let's get that out of the way first.

Although the subject and file names are different this is exactly the same as in Part 1. The harder part is figuring out how to link the actual bits of the attachment. Coming from the Salesforce Attachment objects is simply linking to the Body field (S7 here) – no need to worry about whether the field is last with Salesforce:

On the Dynamics CRM side there appear to be three possible options on the annotation entity: documentbody, vfAttachmentBase64, or vfAttachment.

Using documentbody has the same result we saw in Part 1 – running this job will result in an error message that contains the following:

A high surrogate character must have a value from range (0xD800 - 0xDBFF).

We still cannot link the attachment directly into the documentbody field. Using vfAttachmentBase64 results in an error message:

CrmService.Execute(UpdateRequest) – The request failed with HTTP status 400: Bad Request.

The problem here is that we are attempting to send an attachment that we are telling the adapter is already encoded as base64, but that is actually not encoded as base64. If we use vfAttachment things work out just fine.

From the test window

And the result in Dynamics CRM:

Hope this helps. Please let me know of other scenarios or issues that you have with attachments and Dynamics CRM.

SugarCRM’s Dreamforce marketing stunt – what do you think?

I am in San Francisco for Salesforce's Dreamforce conference and I have just witnessed a marketing tactic that I've never seen before. However, this tactic did not come from Salesforce but rather their competitor Sugar CRM. Salesforce, a Scribe partner, has done a tremendous job with this conference and has dramatically outperformed their upside attendance projections with some 19,000+ attendees. The keynote addresses have been completely packed and many sessions have been filled to capacity. The attendees are clearly happy customers and partners and this is their big party.

As always, Salesforce is innovating and leading the way. The announcement of Salesforce's chatter social computing platform is interesting and forward thinking. Marc Benioff is a great marketer and evangelist and there is no better example of that than the distribution of his new book "Behind the Cloud" (co-written by the talented Carlye Adler) here at the conference.

However, although this is Salesforce's event, Sugar CRM is here distributing copies of a mock book titled "Behind the Smoke Screen". The mock book is designed to look like Benioff's book but has fabricated mock endorsements and content that feigns humor.  Inside the book is an offer for a Salesforce to Sugar migration.  This tactic is similar to the types of things Salesforce themselves did at Siebel conferences years ago.

So, the question is whether Sugar's tactic will benefit them. I have to assume that the people who pay to come to Dreamforce are Salesforce's main proponents and come to Dreamforce to go deeper with Salesforce rather than find a replacement to it. Further, while business is a contact sport, is it acceptable for one vendor to encroach on another's event in this way? Some people believe that all press is good press but is that really true?

Ironically, after seeing copies of Sugar CRM's mock book I attended an invitation only session titled "Building Brand, the Salesforce Way" given by Salesforce Chief Creative Officer Bruce Campbell. The session was great and Mr. Campbell's main point was that your customers, not your company, are the owners of your brand. Mr. Campbell made the point that an organization's interactions with its customers, the quality of its products and everything else it does defines how people feel about the company and, therefore, the brand.  I wonder what Sugar's actions at Dreamforce will make people feel about their company and brand.

What do you think?