As one of the most popular CRM solutions, many organizations either already use Salesforce or are looking to start using it. Being able to tightly integrate Salesforce with your Drupal site allows you to leverage rich CRM data in your Drupal site and/or have Drupal serve as a flexible interface for sending data to Salesforce for processing and analysis.

While there has been a Salesforce/Drupal integration around since 2007, the Drupal 7 version was lagging in terms of innovation, flexibility, and fully leveraging the D7 API. As a result, adoption was lagging as well. ThinkShout recently spearheaded the rewrite of the module to leverage OAUTH, Salesforce’s REST API, and is chock full of Drupal 7 goodness, in particular the entity system and Entity API’s metadata wrappers.

The 7.x-3.x version of the Drupal Salesforce module enables single or bi-directional synchronization of data between Salesforce objects and Drupal entities, with features including:

• Specify directionality and other settings at the field level. E.g., push Drupal user IDs to Salesforce when a Drupal user is created, pull SF ID into Drupal when an SF contact is created, and sync the name when either is updated or created.
• Entity level trigger points.
• Sync related entities and objects using their native IDs.
• Lots of hooks for other modules to alter data moving between SF and Drupal.
• Use the more robust SOAP API or the leaner REST API.
• Sync data in realtime or batch it.

This talk will discuss the technical aspects of integrating Drupal and Salesforce and then explore how to leverage this tool in your projects.