Top 3 Things to Consider When Preparing for Integrations

Are you considering integrating another system in Salesforce? Preparing for such a task is crucial to the success and stability of the project and can often times be challenging. As consultants, we are faced with a lot of projects that include some type of integration and we have seen the effect of how disastrous it can become without asking the right questions during discovery. Here is a top 3 list of some often-missed important questions to ask when preparing for an integration with Salesforce.

1. What is the SOR (System of Record)?

A System of Record is an authoritative data source for a particular data point. Knowing which system is the SOR will help tremendously in architecting an integration flow that promotes clean and accurate data. Before any decision is made on which system will be the SOR, there needs to be confident that the data in that system has clean data to begin with. If this integration is going to be part of a larger integration with other systems, then a Master Data Management (MDM) tool should be used to help keep your data clean and standardized. One tool we enjoy using is Boomi’s MDM platform.

2. How frequently does the integration need to run?

Salesforce, as you may know, is a multi-tenant platform and there are governor limits enforced by the platform to ensure no one Salesforce org consumes all the shared resources. Knowing how often the integration needs to run will help you foresee and plan around hitting API limits. Knowing your Salesforce’s daily API limit is a must before asking this question. Each Salesforce edition has different limits. Be wary of real-time integrations. Real-time integrations can be difficult to avoid API limits and should only be considered when there is no other way.

3. Do the systems support bulk operations?

This question focuses on the other system that you wanting to integrate with. Salesforce does provide bulk operations, such as Bulk API. If you are preparing for is an inbound integration with Salesforce, does the source system support calling out in batches? If the integration is outbound, does the other system’s api support bulk? Salesforce only allows 100 callouts per transaction so if the target system does not support bulk operations, you will have to consider batching the records to avoid hitting governor limits. See this help document for more information on platform governor limits.

Conclusion

There is a lot to consider when preparing for an integration. Each kind of integration has its caveats. Though this list is not by any means exhaustive, I hope it has helped spark some conversation topics for your next discovery meeting.

There is much, much more to integrations. If any questions about Salesforce integrations come up, we can help. Leave a comment below!