lightning connect: lessons learned
TRANSCRIPT
What is Lightning Connect?
Lightning Connect maps Salesforce external objects to data tables in external systems. Instead of copying the data into your organization, Lightning Connect accesses the data on demand and in real time. The data is never stale, and we access only what you need.
Recommended when:
• You have a large amount of data that you don’t want to copy into your Salesforce organization.
• You need small amounts of data at any one time.
• You want real-time access to the latest data.
What is Lightning Connect?
5 Day POC and Lessons Learned
Based on article from Salesforce developers site Session today will have more drama
Day 1 Request Connection Information for POC
Time: 15 minutes Level of Difficulty: Easy Contacted Progress Software IT and Sales Operations with my intent to do a proof of concept
(POC) for Lightning Connect to integrate invoices from our system of record behind the corporate firewall with our Sales Cloud as an External Data Source.
Colleagues involved: Balaji Srinivasan, Sr Manager IT
Lessons Learned: Learned that invoices are stored in both ERP and the Data Warehouse. Data Warehouse
access was recommended for this POC since it’s historical in nature.
Day 1 Request Connection Information for POC
Corporate Firewall
Invoices
Day 2 Data Model Relationship Planning
Time: 15 minutes Level of Difficulty: Easy My credentials to the data warehouse were created and I set up a quick call with our Sales Operations analyst who provided the entities in the data warehouse that contain invoice data, which happen to be “Invoice.” Field nameFilter criteria Invoice_SoldTo= account.Customer_Number__c Colleagues Involved: Brian Rourk, Sales Operations Analyst
Lessons Learned: When new to external data, there are people who already know the data really well.
Day 2 Data Model Relationship Planning
Corporate Firewall
Invoices
Day 3 Get Started with Developer and Trial Accounts
Time: 60 minutes Level of Difficulty: Easy Provided Salesforce our production organization ID to evaluate Lightning Connect. In the meantime, I created a developer account in Salesforce that comes with Lightning Connect (limited to 1 external data source) at https://developer.salesforce.com/signup. Next I created a trial account in DataDirect Cloud (http://www.datadirectcloud.com) to produce OData from our on-premise data warehouse for Lightning Connect External Objects. Colleagues Involved: N/A – Salesforce Account Team
Lessons Learned: It was helpful to find a self-service click-not-code solution for producing Odata for Lightning Connect.
Day 3 Get Started with Developer and Trial Accounts
Corporate Firewall
Invoices
Developer Account
Day 4 Building Related Lists in Developer Sandbox
Time: 60 minutes Level of Difficulty: Intermediate I ran into an issue creating a related list with external objects by following this tutorial from tquila. So I posted my question to the Salesforce community and received an answer that same day from Carolina Ruiz Medina, Principal Developer at Financial Force. https://developer.salesforce.com/forums/ForumsMain?id=906F0000000AyT7IAK
Lessons Learned: The Salesforce Community has seen everything.
Day 4 Building Related Lists in Developer Sandbox
Corporate Firewall
Invoices
Developer Account
Day 5 Migrating the POC From Development to Sandbox
Time: 60 minutes Level of Difficulty: Easy Then I received a note from James Green at Salesforce that Lightning Connect has been successfully enabled on our org. I requested our Sales Operations create a new sandbox since the feature cannot be directly enabled for existing sandboxes. My new sandbox was then ready to go, thanks to SalesOps: https://cs15.salesforce.com I double-checked creation of an external data source and verified the type “Lightning Connect: OData 2.0” is available, which means it worked; and I’m no longer limited to just one as in my developer account! Colleagues Involved: Brian Rourk, Sales Operations Analyst
Lessons Learned: Create a new sandbox AFTER Lightning Connect or new features are enabled on my org.
Day 5 Migrating the POC From Development to Sandbox
Corporate Firewall
Invoices
cs15.salesforce.com
Demo
Demo With live invoice data
Future projects
Future projects Internal Roadmap for Lightning Connect
1. Service Cloud entitlement against ERP.
2. Oracle Marketing Cloud integration to create related lists for marketing activity in the Contact object (email send, email open, campaign details, etc).
3. Google analytics integration to show content for page views / domains in the Account object.
4. Integration with Sumologic Big Data Analytics to track user experiences of cloud services.
Lessons Learned: Even though we’re using DataDirect Cloud for all of these, not all OData sources are the same.
Q&A @SAsInSumit
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