Salesforce

Introduction

Marketing automation is a set of software applications that will help you automate your marketing process. It enables you to send consistent, personalized messages to your customers and prospects based on their behavior and preferences.

Marketing automation can make the difference between success and failure for your business when it comes to marketing efforts. Without it, it’s difficult to keep up with all the things that need doing in order to be successful. Salesforce CRM Integration Services is a great option for you to build better customer relationships and enhance marketing strategies.

However, like any tool or technology, there are many options available for this type of service – not all of which are created equal! There are some key questions you should ask before choosing one platform over another:

Pardot

Pardot is a marketing automation platform that helps marketers build and nurture relationships with leads, track their progress through the buyer’s journey and close more deals. Pardot provides lead scoring capabilities which allow you to determine the value of each prospect based on their level of engagement with your company. It also allows you to create custom workflows for different types of prospects so that you can personalize messages based on how engaged they are with your brand.

User friendliness

The user interface is very easy to navigate and understand which makes it ideal for beginners looking to get started quickly without having too much trouble learning how everything works together at first glance.

Integration Capabilities

Pardot has over 100+ integrations available including Salesforce CRM integration which allows users access data from both platforms through one single login screen (which makes things easier).

Marketo

Marketo is a marketing automation platform that helps businesses create, manage and optimize digital experiences across all marketing channels. It has a built-in analytics suite that monitors the performance of your digital marketing campaigns, including lead scoring capabilities, user-friendliness and integration capabilities.

Marketo’s email marketing capabilities allow you to send personalized emails based on customer preferences or behavior patterns, which means you can deliver content at just the right time for maximum engagement with your brand.

Hubspot

Hubspot is a marketing automation platform that allows you to manage your entire customer lifecycle from lead generation to conversion. Hubspot has a free plan and paid plans, which are based on the number of contacts in your database (beyond 10,000).

Free Plan

Hubspot CRM

Tracks contact information for all of your leads and customers in one place so you can easily follow up with them at any time. It also includes integrations with other popular services like Salesforce or Google Analytics so that you can track analytics from within the same dashboard as well!

Hubspot CMS

Allows users to create landing pages without having any coding experience; this feature makes it easy for anyone at any level on their team (even non-technical folks) to create amazing content without having any technical knowledge at all!

Paid Plans

Lead Scoring Capabilities

Allows marketers who don’t have much experience creating their own formulas into doing so by providing them with pre-defined rulesets based on different criteria like industry type/size etc., which makes it easier than ever before when trying find new leads within their target market segmentation strategy.”

Takeaway

Pardot is a great marketing automation tool to help you with your lead generation and marketing campaigns. Marketo is another popular option, but Hubspot may be better suited to your needs.

With these three tools, you can easily manage all of your marketing activities from one place–from setting up landing pages and email campaigns to tracking conversions and revenue metrics. But which one should you use?

Conclusion

Marketo is a great platform for marketing automation, but it can be hard to use and expensive. Hubspot offers many of the same features in a simpler interface at a lower price point. Pardot is a good choice if you need more extensive integration with Salesforce or other CRM tools than either option offers. However, if you still need expert advice, contact Cloud Fountain. It offers Custom Application Development Services in USA. Their team will help you with choosing the right platform.

Salesforce has helped organizations in handling their customer databases for over two decades. This means the technology has been in the domain for a considerable time.

This technology is prominent because it enables users with the right mix of personalization and automation to tailor the services to the client’s requirements. Even if your business demands to extend the functionalities of CRM and merge it with other platforms, Salesforce integration comes into the picture.

As a company offering Salesforce Development Services in USA, we want to highlight all about Salesforce Integration. Whether you’re new to the business world or already are an established business, the article will benefit both. Let’s first start by understanding what Salesforce Integration is.

What is Salesforce Integration? 

Salesforce’s primary purpose is to offer users a unified experience. Salesforce integration is merging the data and functionality of Salesforce with another application. Doing so enables any team with a mix of features from both platforms. Salesforce users face the issue of reconciling data between two platforms and switching them when performing certain activities. Salesforce Integration relieves you from this issue by offering a centralized platform to work on.

Why do Businesses Prefer Salesforces?

This technology is still used by numerous companies across the globe as it helps them be more effective particularly in the areas of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and remote workforce. While customers and employees are two of the strongest pillars of a successful business, companies flock toward Salesforce.

Now that we know what Salesforce Integration is, let’s look at two major approaches to carry out the process of Salesforce integration.

Code-based Salesforce Integration 

One can carry out Salesforce integration even with the help of a programming language instead of using dedicated applications. Apex is among the most prominent programming languages used for code-based salesforce integration. Since the syntax of this language is similar to Java, you will get many developers to code for you.

A few benefits of carrying out code-based Salesforce integration with Apex language are:

• If offers built-in support for Salesforce lightning platform
• It is apt for different API versions
• It is easy to understand and simple to use

If you want to know more about this approach, take Salesforce Integration consulting from a well-known company offering development services like ours. Let us look at another Salesforce Integration approach: App-based.

App-based Salesforce Integration 

As per the name, app-based Salesforce integration is carried out with dedicated applications. These apps enable users to integrate data between two applications and build a unified platform with a few clicks. If you need to integrate your Salesforce CEM with other applications, you will need a robust integration platform that lets seamless transfer of data between two applications. There are some more prominent third-party apps that enable effective Salesforce integration like Jitterbit and Zapier and many others.

While these two are the most used approaches to integrate Salesforce in your system, there are several others. We will have a look at these approaches. Salesforce integration can be done for varying layers within your CRM platforms like user interface, data, and business logic.

User Interface Integration 

Through this integration, users are permitted to enter different applications via a single unified platform. The approach used here is similar to that of Facebook wherein different application vendors are allowed to post content on a single platform. This is one of the most crucial integration types since users in companies need to traverse through different applications from a single platform.

Business Logic Integration 

Business logic integration involves using Apex Web Services for handling inbound and outbound business logic across different applications. The aim here is to accomplish end-to-end business processes. When an application has a business logic integrated, it lets users work efficiently with large amounts of data.

Data Integration

Through data integration, you can use SOAP or REST APIs(types of APIs) to allow a centralized application in your organization. It acts as a key source of a specific business object. This type of integration does not require any coding and it can’t be used to implement any type of custom logic. Data integration, unlike business logic, is fixed. 

Salesforce Integration Checklist 

Salesforce has an integration checklist for all companies/businesses wanting to integrate its services. Before moving ahead with Salesforce integration, ensure you adhere to this checklist for a seamless integration process. You can consult a Salesforce expert if you need to be certain of adhering to this checklist.

Extensive Implementation Planning 

The most significant part of Salesforce Integration is to develop an extensive implementation plan. Just how any other project requires you to create a project timeline to clearly define the objectives of the project, so does Salesforce integration.

Ensure you list down all the technical requirements required for Salesforce integration and the objectives you want to achieve. Also ensure you’re thoroughly aware of the Salesforce integration guidelines and practices while preparing the plan. If you can afford, it’s best to take professional help with Salesforce integration.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully, the blog helped you know all about Salesforce Integration and how to do it. If you’re looking for Salesforce Integration services in USA, feel free to contact us. We offer consulting, development and post-development services for your mobile app or website. All we need are your business and budget requirements!

Salesforce Chatter–a cloud-based collaborative tool enables an opportunity for salesforce.com to reach every employee of an organization. Salesforce is the world’s leading cloud-based software provider delivering services to over 15000 businesses globally.
If you’ve ever wondered about Salesforce Chatter, its purpose, or why you should consider using the tool, this blog will satiate your curiosity.
Before we get to the nitty gritty of this tool, it is worth noting that it is World’s first Cloud 2 enterprise social collaboration application unlocking huge potential. Moreover, its unique features make it better than the existing collaborative tools. Let us understand what Salesforce Chatter is.

What is Salesforce Chatter?

Salesforce Chatter is a collaboration application that enables employees to share information, talk to each other and work together. The tool lets you follow people and groups within the organization’s internal network. The working of this feature is similar to the working of Facebook. So, it is a miniature social-networking platform explicitly designed for businesses using Salesforce.

Now that we know what Salesforce Chatter is, below is a breakdown of its features and benefits that make it a one-of-its-kind tool. Let us dive right in.

What are the Key Features of Salesforce Chatter?

As a company offering Salesforce Application development Services, we want to highlight some key features of Salesforce Chatter.

Upload files and manage version control

How many times did you have to rework because of having the wrong version of a document? While these may seem like small bugs, they could have more significant client-facing issues. Chatter offers version control that helps you stop running into such matters. You can keep files like PDFs or word documents up to date with Chatter Files.

Create tasks and polls

Creating actions is an excellent feature for any chat application. It lets users write types of Chatter posts and create & edit records from the Chatter feed. Another helpful part is creating Poll posts. You can use this feature for effective decision-making, such as who to staff on which project, when to start a meeting, etc.

Automate an Out of Office message

You won’t have to wait for answers from employees who aren’t working. With Chatter’s ‘Out of Office’ status, users can write a post and specify their start/end dates for the time they’ve gone.

Reject or Approve records

The tool lets users reject or approve changes to records in several situations, including managing work hours, approving them, and checking updates on other information. To reject or approve records, users should search for the record and find where to reject or approve.

More than a tool for effective communication, it is a comprehensive tool that helps your team collaborate effectively. It allows users to communicate securely at work to share files, establish connections and share status updates.

What are the Benefits of Salesforce Chatter?

After knowing the key features of Salesforce chatter, let’s dig a little deeper into understanding its benefits. While features let you know what the tool offers, benefits state how businesses can use these features to solve their business challenges.

Cleanse emails

You can efficiently declutter emails with chatter tools like group forums, file sharing, and online chats. The tool also allows you to update your projects and share them with other members, after which you can track the updates with the help of the comment section of your post.

Easily share files

Imagine spending time uploading large files and sending them across through emails. This way of sharing files has now taken a back seat when tools like Salesforce Chatter can do the task within a few minutes.

Bid farewell to meetings

Unnecessary meetings take up a lot of time and adversely affect the business’s overall productivity. With Salesforce Chatter, groups can virtually discuss all their ideas and even cancel meetings when not required. The group forum feature lets you share valuable information with other team members, which is a sure-shot way to have more meaningful and constructive discussions.

Promotes organizational unity

The tool is especially suitable for organizations where employees are constantly leaving and coming or where employees are spread across varying regions and countries. Salesforce Chatter comes to the rescue as it helps maintain a healthy work environment with remote employees from across the globe.

Helps save time

The above-mentioned tasks save time along with real purpose. Less uploading and downloading time, proper communication, etc. help you save a lot of time. With the help of this, work efficiency also gets maintained. Features like Version control in Chatter are responsible for saving time for the employees and the organization.

Connected teams

As a company offering Salesforce CRM Integration Services, it comes under our umbrella of responsibilities to also help you integrate plug-ins or activate features like Salesforce chatter. This tool offers real-time updates and alerts for any changes in the projects going under discussion or among teammates. It also enables you to chat with your team members through audio/video calls or texts while viewing the same screen of Salesforce.

Overall, an efficient workplace

These overall benefits aid in an efficient workplace. Salesforce Chatter application helps to make the workplace more efficient for the entire organization. With the help of chatter features, your team can communicate effectively, which leaves your business time to indulge in meaningful activities rather than having long meetings.

Business Challenges of Salesforce Chatter

While we may think Salesforce Chatter is all perks, it’s far from true. There are many challenges with this feature as well. Let’s have a look at a few challenges.

It can be uncomfortable for new users

Chatter is a new thing for users. While some may be comfortable with social networking tools, others may have had no exposure. For those who won’t be comfortable using the tool, it can make them uncomfortable, and it may take considerable time to get accustomed to it. A well-thought communication plan will familiarize users with such social media tools. However, it could be time-consuming.

Communication overload

Yet another common concern for businesses using Salesforce Chatter is information overload. Employees may have a habit of checking their inboxes before ending their workday. Chatter posts as emails would overload their inbox with unread emails. It’s important to note that implementing Chatter can cause an overload in communication and can be overwhelming for some.

No control over what users’ chat about

Many executives get nervous thinking about the fact that they can’t control what people say on Chatter. While they can provide best practices stating what to use and what not to use on Chatter, but at the end, the users control conversations. This could pose a threat to businesses because if the employees use the tool for negative purposes, it could backfire and adversely affect the business’ overall productivity.

You need full Salesforce access

One of the primary challenges of Salesforce Chatter is that your business needs to implement Salesforce. You can’t use Salesforce Chatter without Salesforce since it’s not a standalone feature. This could be an issue for businesses with a tight budget, as implementing Salesforce might not be feasible for all businesses.

Inexperienced support team

Once the implementation is complete, you’ll need ongoing support to ensure that the platform works properly under different circumstances. However, a lack of proper support can severely impact your team’s productivity. So investing in a reliable support team is of utmost importance for a business to run smoothly.

As stated above, Salesforce Chatter has its perks and challenges. However, with a smooth and experienced Salesforce Integration company like ours, implementing this feature makes the process seamless.

In Conclusion

The blog talks about everything you should know about Salesforce Chatter. As a Salesforce Integration Company in USA, we at CloudFountain Inc. offers Application support, Amazon Web Services Consulting, Cloud Consulting, Big data consulting, Custom Application Development. If you intend to know more about our services or specifically about Salesforce chatter feature activation, we’re more than happy to help you solve your queries!

MicroStrategy is a platform which provides Business Intelligence service, interactive dashboards, scorecards, highly formatted reports, ad hoc query, thresholds and alerts, and automated report distribution.

Integrating Salesforce.com and other applications with MicroStrategy, will turbocharge your operational reporting with advanced analytics and excellent visualization in MicroStrategy.

In such an environment, MicroStrategy is able to mix data from Sales, product, operations with financial data and give insights which are not possible to derive from just one application. These reports can be displayed inside Salesforce.com using a Canvas application. This enables users to view MicroStrategy reports without navigating out of Salesforce.

Some of the problems encountered in MicroStrategy in such integrations are:

1. Database is in Use.

Solution: Set the CreateDB parameter to 2.

The following are valid values for the ‘Create Database/CreateDB’ setting:

• If set to 0 (No), the driver will check to see if a database exists and if does not find one the connection will fail.   The driver will not attempt to create the locally embedded database.
• If set to 1 (ForceNew), the driver will delete the existing database if it exists and will create a new database for each new connection.
• If set to 2 (NotExist), and the driver detects an existing database it will not attempt to create the database.  If the driver does not find an existing database it will create the database.

2. QueryEngine encountered error: Connect failed.

2017-10-01 20:21:41.534-05:00 [HOST:xyz123-1.abc123.com][PID:xxxx][THR:2837067520][Query Engine][Error][0x80042300] QueryEngine encountered error: Connect failed.

Error type: Odbc error. Odbc operation attempted: SQLDriverConnect. [HY000:-40: on SQLHANDLE] [MicroStrategy][ODBC Salesforce driver][Salesforce]General error: java.util.ServiceConfigurationError: javax.xml.ws.spi.Provider: Provider com.ddtek.sforce.externals.org.apache.cxf.jaxws22.spi.ProviderImpl could not be instantiated: java.lang.NoClassDefFo Connection String: DSN=SF;UID=abc@xyz.com;..

Solution: This is due to JDK environment setup issue and requires a manual restart.

3. “column not found” issue

Solution: “REFRESH SCHEMA SFORCE;” before the query of the cube, so this should run every time the cube is executed.

If you need any additional details on Salesforce.com and integration, please feel free to contact ketan.benegal@thecloudfountain.com.

Salesforce is introducing Lightning Data Service Beta version in Summer ’17 release. This will prove to be a very useful and exciting feature for the developers. Consider Lightning Data Service a response to Standard (Set) Controller for VisualForce pages. Lightning Data Service allows to load, create, edit, or delete a record in your component without requiring Apex code as well as handles sharing rules and field-level security for you. Additionally Lightning Data Service improves performance and user interface consistency.

Problem 1: Data Reuse across different component.

Let us consider a scenario where we have 3 components and each component is making an independent call to the server to perform the CRUD(Create, Read ,Update and Delete) operation on the same set of data.

In such scenario, you would have Apex code being called separately for each component creating overhead for the system.

Problem 2: Data Inconsistency

It is possible that the field is updated but because of some issue it is not reflected everywhere.

Lightning Data Services to the rescue!!(Well Almost!)

Salesforce brings Lightning Data Service to the rescue (I said almost because it is in Beta state, hence we will have to wait until it goes live and get the finalized version. But don’t let it dampen your spirits!). Consider Lightning Data Service to be the Standard (Set) Controller for your Lightning Components.

With the LDS a consolidate request is made and stored in a highly efficient cache, the caching is shared across components on the users’ browser, so server requests are not made on cache hits. LDS further optimizes the cache, by only storing the fields that have been requested

When a component updates the viewed record, all the other components using that record on the page are notified, and in most cases refreshed automatically. Additionally, it also supports the parent-child relationship between SObjects.

This retains UI consistency and eliminates the need for a programmatic refresh.

Benefits of LDS

• No Apex or SOQL.
• Performance boost from client cache.
• Data available offline.
• Data consistency across components.
• Automatic record refresh from server.
• Automatic notification when record changes.

Lightning Data Services consist of following:

• force:recordPreview tag
• getNewRecord() method
• saveRecord() method
• deleteRecord() method
• recordUpdated Event
• changeType event.

I am excited to try my hands on with LDS. Here I am creating a lightning component using LDS to edit the accounts record.

Step 1: Create ContactEdit.cmp component

<aura:component implements="flexipage:availableForAllPageTypes,flexipage:availableForRecordHome,force:hasRecordId,force:lightningQuickAction"
access="global">
<aura:attribute name="recordError" type="String"/>
<aura:attribute name="recordInfo" type="Object" />
<aura:attribute name="simpleRecord" type="Object"/>
<aura:attribute name="curView" type="String" />
<force:recordData aura:id="recordHandler"
recordId="{!v.recordId}"
layoutType="FULL"
targetRecord="{!v.recordInfo}"
targetFields="{!v.simpleRecord}"
mode="EDIT"
/>
<div>
<div>
<lightning:input type="text" label="Department" value="{!v.simpleRecord.Department}" />
</div>
<div>
<lightning:input type="text" label="Phone" value="{!v.simpleRecord.Phone}" />
</div>
<div>
<lightning:input type="text" label="Title" value="{!v.simpleRecord.Title}" />
</div>
 
 
<div>
<lightning:button variant="brand" label="Save"  onclick="{!c.saveRecordCntrlr}"/>
<lightning:button label="Cancel"  onclick="{!c.cancelSaveRecord}"/>
</div>
</div>
</aura:component>
 

Step 2: Create ContactEditController.js

({ saveRecordCntrlr : function(component, event, helper) { component.find(“recordHandler”).saveRecord($A.getCallback(function(saveResult) { if (saveResult.state === “SUCCESS” || saveResult.state === “DRAFT”) { component.set(“v.curView”, “baseView” ); } else if (saveResult.state === “INCOMPLETE”) { console.log(“User is offline, device doesn’t support drafts.”); } else if (saveResult.state === “ERROR”) { console.log(‘Problem saving record, error: ‘ + JSON.stringify(saveResult.error)); } else { console.log(‘Unknown problem, state: ‘ + saveResult.state + ‘, error: ‘ + JSON.stringify(saveResult.error)); } })); }, cancelSaveRecord : function(component, event, helper){ component.set(“v.curView”, “baseView” ); } })

Step 3: Go to Setup -> Object Manager -> Contacts -> Buttons Links and Action and create a quick action and select ContactEdit component and click save.

Now we can see the output below

Like always your feedback is invaluable. Please keep posting your questions or concerns. I will try to put more graphics for clarity.