Drupal is a strong CMS contender due to its ability to integrate with various products and services. It has all the tools and modules a business will need to supercharge its customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Combining these Drupal modules with Salesforce, a cloud-based customer relationship management software, can turn your website into a robust sales, marketing and customer engagement tool for your enterprise.

Drupal is a well-established and trusted content management system (CMS) for building powerful websites for organizations – large or small. By integrating Salesforce with your Drupal website, you can enable a seamless connection across your most valued business tools. You can simplify customer relationship management, create and track goals, generate reports and enable your teams to directly work in the cloud through mobile phones, desktops, and tablets. Some of the important benefits of integrating the two trustworthy platforms are:
  • It simplifies business processes and maximizes your Drupal website’s potential
  • It helps to create, update and share complex forms with ease
  • It seamlessly synchronizes Drupal entities like files, users, and nodes with Salesforce objects such as contacts, campaigns, opportunities and organizations through the Drupal-Salesforce Suite module
  • It integrates email campaigns and eCommerce
  • It enables data sharing in one or two directions between your CRM and website
  • It maps and defines objects and fields
  • Its integrated and customizable system helps to save time and resources
There are three ways to integrate Salesforce into Drupal web development for enterprise.


The Salesforce Suite:

This module supports two integration methods:


  • Real-time integration – In this method, the Drupal objects are immediately exported to Salesforce. An instant feedback is sent indicating whether the item failed to export or the data is instantly available in Salesforce.
  • Queue-based integration – This method uses a batching system that runs in the background which sends multiple objects to Salesforce at one time. In other words, instead of sending an object to Salesforce as soon as it is created, edited or deleted, it is sent into a queue where it is scheduled to be exported with other items. The scheduled are then picked as per the configurable schedule (i.e. 1- to 15 minutes) and exported to Salesforce in batches.

Springboard:
Springboard is an online fundraising and marketing solution developed by Jackson River. It is a suite of native Drupal 7 modules and an open source platform providing powerful fundraising and marketing features right inside your Drupal website. It includes features such as queue-based Salesforce integration, Google Analytics eCommerce integration, peer to peer fundraising and more, enabling the organizations to deploy a PCI complaint fundraising system within the Drupal 7 website. You can visit www.jacksonriver.com/springboard for more information on Springboard.

Paid integration solutions:
There are various other commercial tools to power Drupal-Salesforce integration including Cast Iron, Informatica, and Jitterbit. These tools can either be configured to run automatically or used for integrating data between Drupal and Salesforce.

Conclusion
The Drupal community is backed by a number of key agencies that ensure the Salesforce Suite modules are continually upgraded to keep pace with the new features and functionalities of the Salesforce platform. So, whether you prefer a basic synchronization or a more sophisticated setup, Drupal offers all the tools for a stable and reliable integration. Integrating your Drupal website with Salesforce can streamline your business process resulting in less cost and more efficiency for your enterprise. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding Drupal-Salesforce integration, do feel free to share with us in the comments.