Integrating enterprise applications is a crucial requirement for many organizations.  Operational data cannot live in silos if your business hopes to be able to analyze trends and take action in a timely manner.  One of the increasingly common eProject integration requirements we are seeing is Salesforce.com (SFDC).

We are developing bi-directional SFDC integration for eProject Project Request and Project data, however you can get a head start on passing CRM data from SFDC to eProject leveraging eProject Dynamic Application web forms and workflow notifications along with SFDC S-Controls and custom links. The best part is that you can get started today with zero programming or web service knowledge.

As an example, we recently created an integration between SFDC and eProject to record and communicate eProject implementation details upon completion of a services engagement:

Upon completion of a services engagement, the eProject Solutions Consultant creates an “Implementation Summary” record in SFDC, which includes data points like the primary implementation contact, number of users trained, processes supported, which departments or groups are using eProject, primary implementation goals, challenges, and next steps.  This becomes a part of the Account history, and is available to our Services, Support, Sales and Marketing teams.

Once the record is created in SFDC, the Solutions Consultant “pushes” a copy of the Implementation Summary to eProject via a custom button and S-Control created from the DA webform.  We only carry over a subset of the SFDC data, focusing on those data points that would of interest or use to the company at large, primarily the customer summary, implementation goals, and implementation challenges.  The entire company is automatically notified about our newly deployed customers via eProject workflow configuration.

(Click thumbnail for full workflow detail)

This allows us to capture a very detailed summary of a customer implementation under the master customer record in SFDC while sharing pertinent customer information with the entire company, including those who do not have SFDC licenses, such as Engineering, Network Operations and Administrative staff.  This helps us to improve our company-wide customer intelligence without creating an excessive amount of work for the services team as they wrap up customer engagements.

Other Dynamic Application integrations might include work orders, expense tracking, escalation requests, action items, or any other processes that might be initiated from SFDC and acted upon or managed in eProject.

In forthcoming articles, I’ll cover the steps required to set up a basic SFDC -> eProject integration, advanced capabilities, and the possibility of integrating Project Requests via the Project Request webform.

Your comments, questions and suggestions are welcome!