Jitterbit: Integration with Salesforce.com
I sat in on a webinar for Jitterbit open source integration server. The goal of Jitterbit is to make your integrations easier by allowing you to connect various data sources together based on rules and schedules you create. You can save these out as Jitterpacks, which can be shared freely.
You basically are doing operations that go get data, and then do something with it. Go get all the Accounts from Salesforce.com, then update/create Company records in another database with that data. You also get to chain the operations together, so after you update/create the Company records, you can then go back to Salesforce and get all newly modified Opportunities, creating Orders in the database related to the correct Company.
The webinar walked through creating an integration with Salesforce.com and PostgreSQL.
- You describe Salesforce.com by uploading your enterprise WSDL to Jitterbit
- Chose the methods you want to use in your integration: login, describeGlobal, describeSObject, query, querymore, create.
- Create operations, like login to Salesforce, grab some data and put it in a database.
- Chain the operations together to make your integration logic
- Schedule the whole shebang
I built a series of operations that integrates our dotproject project management app with Salesforce.com. Using PHP, I wrote out the operations and transformations by hand. Seems like I could recreate this logic in Jitterbit fairly easily, once I get over the initial learning curve. I don’t think I’ll have time to go this route any time soon, but I could see making the investment if I had to make major changes to our integration.
It’s a pretty cool system. I don’t have clients who need this kind of thing right now, but I think Jitterbit would be a good option for people needing true integration between Salesforce.com and other database applications.
tags: salesforce.com, jitterbit, integration
