I'm looking for some advice from developers/administrators that have used Salesforce as a data replication tool. We are attempting to port over a list of contacts from a vanilla SQL Server instance into Salesforce - the SQL Server instance currently drives a website, stores user preferences, passwords, etc., and Salesforce will be used to carve out contact lists based on demographics and other criteria, and add those users to campaigns.
Currently, our plan is to do a nightly sync of our SQL Server data with Salesforce to update the contact data. Additionally, if a user is added to a campaign through Salesforce, we want to be able to push that data back into our SQL Server instance as well (so the contacts can see what campaigns they've been added to, for instance).
We also have a number of custom tables in SQL Server that we want stored in Salesforce - this will probably be done with a number of custom objects, unless there's a better approach.
Does anyone have any experience with this - data replication back and forth with Salesforce? We've found a product called DBAmp, made by a company called ForceAmp - i don't have any experience with it, but it looks pretty full-featured, and i'm trying out the demo now. Any other suggestions?
Thanks,
Matt
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This has generally been our experience with Salesforce so far - we were able to find a third-party Salesforce guru who has been able to provide some guidance. It's unfortunate that the Saleforce documentation isn't more complete, or that this functionality isn't native to Salesforce - seems like a common operation, and something that might be useful to a number of users.
dbAmp. Great product, Great price. Great support. If you can write SQL and understand stored procedures(ie. you don't need a pretty GUI point and click interface), it's the way to go.
Used it many times in many situations.
If you're looking for the point and click, try searching at www.appexchange.com for informatica. They have several integration product options, one's even free.
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by: Bill-HansonPosted on 2008-04-24 at 10:54:43ID: 21433405
Sure, we have a couple of Salesforce integration projects running.
In the past, we have tried products like "eBridge" and "Scribe", but one was a nightmare, and the other was just not flexible enough. I don't have any experience with "DBAmp".
In the end, we brought the project in-house and used our own developers to write connectors based on the sForce API (which is 'barely' robust enough to get the job done).