The problem with Salesforce point-to-point integrations

Anyone who has worked for a company that has Salesforce integrated with another application has been in this situation; our integration worked yesterday, and now has stopped. WHY?

Let’s start off by discussing the norm in Salesforce integrations, point-to-point solutions. A point-to-point (P2P) solution is developed in Apex and calls out to an external API either retrieving or pushing data. Alternatively, it could be an external system calling directly to the Salesforce API. Maybe it is an ERP, a home-grown database, or another application like JIRA or Stripe. Either way, the solution lives in code and requires a technical resource to maintain it.

Why do these types of integrations fail? Well let’s look quickly at the lifecycle of an integrated point to point solution.

To start you document requirements or user stories, send them over to your in-house or contracted engineering team and they deliver a solution that meets your needs. At first, this works great, awesome! At some point though you will encounter the situation mentioned above, it has stopped working and you don’t know why. Could be any number of reasons causing this issue and you have no visibility into what’s going on. Without a dedicated development team to research and find the problem you may be stuck until someone becomes available to help. Considering how busy engineering teams are with product bugs/backlog/updates who knows when that may be?

The problem is you’ve purchased a tool which is endlessly scalable/configurable (i.e. Salesforce) but you must be constantly aware of the changes you’re making because they may affect your integrations. Things like field names, field types, schemas, credentials, etc., can all lead to integrations that worked fine one day and are broken the next. Add on top of that changes to business processes or the addition of new attributes, and you’ve found yourself in a situation where you’ve purchased a software that allows you (the business) to manage ongoing development but are at the whim of engineering teams to make any changes to the integrations.

Ostrij offers another solution. Ostrij is a configurable Salesforce integration platform that was specifically built to give the business control of what data moves, when it moves, and how it moves.

Why is this better?

Say someone accidentally changes a field name and the integration stops working. Ostrij will immediately notify you via email or Slack of the problem, give you the reason for the error and then it would take you less than a minute to go in and resolve the issue.

If you want to change when the integration event triggers. No problem! It’s as easy as updating a Salesforce workflow rule.

Say you want to add another attribute to the integration mapping. Easy. Done in less than 5 minutes and the next time it runs the value is there.

Best part is we built this for companies that don’t need a heavy, overly complex, integration platform. It’s light weight, powerful, and very affordable.

Contact us for a demo and to talk about your specific integration needs. dbenson@ostrij.com

www.ostrij.com