No secret or surprise that Informatica and Salesforce have been closely aligned and work very well together. Both are cloud solutions which free you from having to manage on-premise networks and access to your business. The ability to schedule jobs and easily identify the changes and connectors for all major data applications means that it is a great choice to use Informatica as the connection between Salesforce and your other applications.
But what are your options when a 5 minute schedule interval is not fast enough? For most other solutions you will need to build a call out to a custom service which you have to build, test and manage.
Informatica to the rescue with real time data integration services. The basic license gives you access to the real-time integration functionality. This allows a no-code solution for running an Informatica task from a Salesforce Workflow.
I was going to write a follow-up post to demo how to create a real-time connection. But it is so simple and quick so let’s just go through the steps here.
We start inside Informatica while creating a data synchronization task. There are several things to remember. First do not add a filter, only one record will be included in this task when it runs. Another thing is do not use the Bulk API as this process could easily use up all the allowable calls. Also, I highly recommend you filter out the integration user from in the Workflow so this task does not start calling itself. That last sentence should scare you a bit because we are walking out into the wild, digital frontier.
The magic happens on the sixth step where you set the schedule. If you are using Salesforce as the source connection a third option for real-time tasks will be in the list.
Setting for Real-time Scheduling
Once you select this option Informatica will generate an end point for you. Copy and paste this URL into your notepad app of choice. It will be needed in the next part. Save the task and now go into Salesforce.
Create a new Workflow with the correct criteria and evaluation rules and then create a task. the task type will be “New Outbound Message”.
- Give it a name and description using a naming pattern that will clearing indicate you are starting a task outside Salesforce.
- Copy and paste the endpoint provided by Informatica into the Endpoint URL field.
- There is no need to send the Session Id as it will not be used.
- Add all the fields that are selected in the source of the task in Informatica.
- Activate the workflow and you are done.
- Wait, better go get a cup of coffee to drink while you watch Salesforce callout to Informatica and update data faster than you can hit F5 and whistle.
Now that I have gone and written my next post in here for you my next post I will discuss using Informatica vs. writing triggers to update records.
Providing access for real-time solutions is a great way to give customers freedom and control over their cloud solutions. Thanks to your picture, it will be very easy for customers and clients to perform their own real-time scheduling so that they don’t have to worry about delays and depending too much on the provider for a such simple task. Great post, this is going to help customers gain confidence in manipulating their cloud solutions for their needs.