Salesforce integration in closed community?

Support
1

I am interested if it is possible to integrate Salesforce into Discourse or vice versa.
This is specifically of interest if Salesforce and Discourse are both using SSO, thus the similar user base.

Examples:

  • Lead generation out of forum discussion (links back to discussion forum)
  • Sales people can see activity of customer/partner in community (to immediately what is of concern for the customer/partner)

I am not a Salesforce expert, thus I don’t know what other use cases are of interest, but I am quite sure that there are some more.

2

Sure. You should be able to have Discourse use the same SSO master and that should do pretty much what you’re looking for.

3

I still cannot imagine how it could work. It’s always difficult to estimate such things before you actually have set up the system. However, at the end such knowledge is often the basis for the decision if you install the system at all.

First of all I assume as Salesforce offers an API and discourse offers an open API almost everything is theoretically possible, right?

However, do your really think it is possible to list the latest or all Discourse forum discussions of a Salesforce account within Salesforce? For this there must be probably some add-on on Salesforce’s side.

On the other hand if I want to generate a Salesforce lead right out of a Discourse discussion I assume it needs some add-on on the side of Discourse to allow that.

It’s still difficult for me to imagine how it could work.

4

Re-reading your question, my definition of “integrate” was a bit simpler than yours.

Does that mean that the person in the Discussion doesn’t have an account in Salesforce? That does seem complicated, though the https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-github-linkback-plugin/66081 might be a starting place to solve that.

That much is true!

I’m not clear exactly what you’re trying to accomplish (I probably don’t know enough about Salesforce enough to understand the question).

5

We do something similar on our wordpress site, using zapier. When people download a file from our resource library, add their organization or sign up in the community, an email is sent to zapier which then adds new contacts, organizations or website actions. We can then follow up via salesforce.

Since zapier just uses the API of salesforce, it should be possible for a programmer to do the same without zapier. But using zapier is a good quick and dirty solution too, perhaps using a dedicated subscribed user who is notified by email by discourse or something like that.

That said, salesforce is complex and hard to use for us, and we’ve had some issues with zapier imported data not being reliable, so we’ve been devoting our time ad energy instead towards moving our workflow out of salesforce and other tools and into discourse. Discourse is central to my community, so my approach is to try to instead contribute to improving discourse functionality that makes this possible, like group inboxes, tagging personal messages, staged users and the like.

More on that over here:

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9

Integrations without automated solutions are harder than it’s supposed to be :smiley:
For example, there’s a possibility to integrate Discourse with ActiveCampaign via connector from Zapier (here’s the documentation on the link ), but it’s really hard to find something relevant regarding Salesforce.
The best way to arrange Salesforce integration via API, especially when it goes vice-versa you should point up a couple of things:

  1. Does your sfdc cloud support such kind of integration?
  2. If yes - are there any fields in Salesforce that are mapping the data you would like to sync with Discourse?
  3. For two-side integration - are those fields mapped equally in both systems, to be understood in case of continuous sync?
    Anyway, there’s still a possibility of customized API data sync with Salesforce integration consultants.
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