Fernando Labastida’s Integration Blog

In keeping a blog on “Integration for Business,” I sometimes feel I have to walk a fine line between keeping neutral and writing an objective commentary on integration issues, and wanting to promote the fact that I work for an integration tools company that sells really cool integration products.  In this post I’m going to cross that line in a major way and talk about the products I sell, so please bear with me.

As I go about my daily job of trying to convince companies to purchase Pervasive’s integration products vs. doing integration in-house or buying a competitors’, I often rely on the knee-jerk claim of the “ease-of-use” of our sofware.  I also get sick and tired of hearing potential customers tell me that some of my competitors’ products are apparently easier to use than my product, even though sometimes they forget that some of those products come bundled with 80 hours of free implementation services (paid for by the high-cost of their product), which of course makes it easier by default.

I got so sick of my competitors’, as well as my own rhetoric, that I decided to try out the product I sell for myself. I wanted to see how easy it actually was to use my product to load leads (I am a sales person) into a test ”developers’” account in Salesforce.com.

I had a handy flat file, ASCII Delimited (tab separated) with names of systems integrators on the West Coast that I had downloaded from Hoovers. I opened the Map Designer tool of Pervasive’s Data Integrator, and went to the purple “Source Connection” tab…

…where I chose ASCII (delimited) as the connector, out of the list of 160+ connectors, in order to connect to the file.

I then chose the file I was going to connect to using the “Source/File” dialog box, and because I had seen my Systems Engineer do demos several times, I knew I had to choose “True” for header in order to make the very first row, the one that has “Account, First Name, Last Name,” etc. become the column header row.

Then I went into the green “Target Connection” tab and from the drop-down list of 160+ connectors chose Salesforce.com v. 10 as my target connector, entered my username, password, and security token (now that Salesforce.com has enforced more enhanced security, you either have to approve the particular browser on the particular machine you’re using to be used to log-in, or you need to add a security token after your password).  Then I hit connect!

What happened?  Nothing….which was a good thing.  If I had hit “connect,” and I had gotten an error, then it would have been bad news, wouldn’t it?  Well, my next step was to choose which table I was going to write to within the “Table” dialog box, still within the green “Target Connector” tab.  I chose the “Leads” table from within the list of all the Salesforce.com tables.

Oh, by the way, not only can you view standard Salesforce.com tables within the Multimode Table Selector dialog box within Pervasive Data Integrator’s Map Designer, you can also view custom tables as well!

Finally, I went to the yellow “Map Fields” tab, where I saw the source fields on the left in purple (or are they blue?), and the target fields in green on the right. 

However, I didn’t see the standard Salesforce.com Lead fields, so I was confused.  Then I spied something on the upper right of the screen, a little R1. I noticed it was a drop-down menu, and sure enough, the one drop-down choice was “Leads,” the table I had chosen in the previous screen.  I chose that and was presented with all the “Leads” fields standard to Salesforce.com.

Pervasive’s Map Designer allows you to use cool functions such as “Match by name,” so that if all the field names in the source as well as the target are exactly the same, you can save a lot of time and map all the fields at once.  There’s also a “Match by position” function, assuming the fields are in the same order.  Finally, you can just drag and drop all the fields at once, transferring en masse the source fields to the target. 

None of those will work in this case, since Salesforce.com has specific field names and positions, so each field has to be mapped individudally.  That’s not such a hassle, especially if you don’t really want to map every single field over.  All I did was individually drag and drop the fields I wanted mapped over from the Source side to the corresponding field in the Target side (First Name to FirstName, Line of Business to Industry, etc.).  I had done my mapping!

The fields I had mapped over appeared as bold in my source fields.  Then I decided to verify that the map was valid, so I pressed the little check-mark on the upper right-hand side of the tool. Since there were some fields I was not mapping to it prompted me to remove those from the schema, which I did. Then I got a “Map is Valid” dialog box.

Now, for the integration.  Pervasive’s Map Designer allows you to execute a transformation from the tool itself, or to save your map as an XML file to deploy it to a run-time engine for automation purposes.  Since I’m a sales guy I don’t know how to do any of that stuff, and all I need to do is upload a few leads anyway that I was going to call the next day, so I’m going to execute the map from the design tool. I would do that by clicking the litttle arrow on the upper left side of the tool, right next to the check-mark.

Before that, however, I needed to make sure these leads weren’t already in my Salesforce.com. Ok, the only leads there were what came with my sample “developer’s version” of Salesforce.com. 

Now I hit the execute button, the little arrow on the upper left.  After a log file appears, and a dialog box with a progress bar, I went back to the “Leads” tab in Salesforce.com, refreshed the browser, and voila!  There are my new leads updated 4/22/2008!

So easy, a salesman can do it!