Commonly Made Mistakes in Salesforce Integration and How One Can Avoid Them

Hey you all, Bienvenue to my blog which is going to tell you about Integration and what few common mistakes occur at the time of integration and how we can avoid them.

About Integration, what we mean is to combine two different systems, portals, applications, etc with each other in order to make them as one application. Integration is very widely implemented nowadays because it unlocks many functionalities, gives us the full power of our data. There are lots of other features integration provides us. It all depends upon the application which we are going to integrate with each other. 

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Take it as an example, you have an e-commerce business and you are using two platforms for managing all your data like inventory, customer, orders, etc. Now what you have to do is you are saving or updating manually each of your data in both the system and how amazing would that be if you get a bridge-like connection where you only work on one platform and the whatever action you are performing on one system gets synchronized on the other too. This will save a lot of time of yours. Integration comes into existence here. We can make this possible by integrating both of the platforms.

As we all know what Salesforce is and what are its features. Salesforce also comes with integration, we can integrate our Salesforce org with any other Salesforce org and also with many different platforms like Mulesoft, Shopify, Google and many more.

In short, Salesforce Integration gives us the power to control data, functionalities, and many other features but several times we make some mistakes while integrating two applications/platforms. Below are some of the most common mistakes we face while integrating and how we can avoid them.

Don’t ever start without a clear scope

This is very important to an organization and their partners that one must have a clear scope and understanding of the project in which they are going to implement integration. To avoid this pre-planning and defining the goals of integration is needed. By doing this we can pre analyze our goals, decisions and also can decide our team. 

Master system must be there

Before proceeding further this must be decided which system will be the master system to store/record all data so that if any other system’s data get mismatched then the master system will be there for correction. If we decide this later then there will be many problems related to our important data so in order to avoid this we must define a master system for our project.

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Wrong Data Mapping

As we are combining/integrating two systems, the data mapping in both of them must b in the correct order so as to avoid data mismatching. If the data in two systems is wrongly mapped then our whole project fails as we will not be getting the exact results as output. 

So to avoid this every field must be mapped properly with the fields of other systems. By doing this we can avoid the extra efforts of our team.

Exceeding of API limits

As we know Salesforce is multi-tenant and everyone shares the same platform, so  Salesforce experts have defined a limit of 1,00,000 API calls/day to make sure that service levels and quality of the system remain constant. 

To avoid this we can low down the frequency of our application and if there is any requirement for a high API, we can purchase some additional API calls to fulfill our requirement.

Bad data

To enter bad data is not a good option for the integration as this affects the whole functionality of the project. So it is always suggested that before moving with the integration, one must remove/clean bad or obsolete data from the systems which they are going to integrate. Doing this early also helps in the setup of data validation rules.

Implementation of System Architecture must be correct

As we already know the Force.com platform comes with many in-build functionalities that provide us many features where we do not want to write any code to perform any action. We can use point and click tools to process our tasks. If our system architecture is proper then we can avoid increasing the time and cost of the project.

We can implement a proper functioning System architecture by:

1. By making a prototype first before proceeding for development.
2. No need to code for that part where we can use the configuration of the Force.com platform.
3. One must use the correct programming language like Apex to create a robust system architecture.

Lacking data management strategy

As we know that integrating means combining two systems so that their data can be managed or shared among each other. There must be a data management strategy to avoid any problem. Data management must be defined in such a way that there should not be any type of conflict occurrence in fields, mapping of data, etc.

Omitting QA and UAT

Most people think that testing is not mandatory in case of integration and this results in the failure of their projects badly. QA is an important phase in the project development and implementation. QA does the deep and thorough testing and checks out any possible issues whereas, in UAT, business users verify that correct data is rolling in and out in their project.

Conclusion: Now we got an overview of what to do and what to avoid while doing integration. So in order to move forward with our integration, we must consider it in three phases:

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1. Pre-planning of the whole project where the whole team can analyze what the project is all about and how things are going to be executed. Documentation also comes under pre-planning.
2. Decision Making is a key aspect of any process. Information gathered during pre-planning must be discussed further in order to make fruitful decisions for the project.
3. Execution is the part where all things come into action. This includes every task like development, implementation, testing, etc. This must be done in the proper way as decided in the pre-planning and decision-making phase. 

An organization that follows the above points and dodge all the possible mistakes boost their chances of success in any part of the SDLC.