Pensieri di un lunatico minore

salesforce.com “gets it”

At work, we use salesforce.com for all of our CRM work. Mostly, it’s used for sales-related doo-dads and gee-gawing, but we’ve been starting to use it for case management for customers. This led us smack-dab into the issue of containing the user in our support system, and providing a lot of things that salesforce.com isn’t designed to provide.

Then I stumbled over their AppExchange developer network, which includes their full API and access to all your data. They don’t keep it to themselves, and instead publish it out using SOAP. Not perfect, but workable, and usable. What’s even better, they’ve recently released ActiveSalesforce, which provides basically transparent integration with ActiveRecord in Rails.

You want to know how easy? This easy:

Contact.find_by_email "john@nowhere.com"

What’s even better?

Case.find_by_status("open").contact

Transparent, cross-table navigation across SOAP. Now that’s something slick. They don’t provide a pre-packaged set of ActiveRecord classes, but that’s easy to do. The definition of the one above is:

class Contact < ActiveRecord::Base
  establish_connection "activesalesforce"
end

Ta’da. No more locking data away where you can’t get at it. There is one problem, documented on Rubyforge about using classes not named identically to their tables. They seem to do some magic in the wrong order inside, but that should be fixable soon.