We all know and love what Plone accomplishes in the content management space, but ambitious tasks of customer and constituent relationship management (CRM) often fall outside the scope of the content management problem domain. Yet the latter is an equally critical need for organizations. Salesforce.com is a well known and established leader for customer and constituent relationship and with it's innovative API-first design, over 50% of all traffic comes via its SOAP API. This makes it an obvious candidate for integration with Plone and there are tools (Beatbox, Salesforce Base Connector, Salesforce PFG Adapter, and Salesforce Auth Plugin) to do just that. This talk will introduce the use cases where Plone can benefit from CRM integration, Salesforce.com's ability to model an organization's business processes, and how, where and why they can and do compliment each other. This has everything to do with choosing the best of breed CRM and CMS and using them together to transform your organization. Why build it from scratch, when you can integrate it with Plone?

1. Plone + Salesforce.com: Best of breed applications working in harm... file:///Volumes/iDisk/Documents/plonecon/plone_and_salesforce.html
Plone + Salesforce.com: Best of breed
applications working in harmony for your
organization
Andrew Burkhalter
Talk Abstract
We all know and love what Plone accomplishes in the content management space, but ambitious tasks of
customer and constituent relationship management (CRM) often fall outside the scope of the content
management problem domain. Yet the latter is an equally critical need for organizations. Salesforce.com
is a well known and established leader for customer and constituent relationship and with it's innovative
API-first design, over 50% of all traffic comes via its SOAP API. This makes it an obvious candidate
for integration with Plone and there are tools (Beatbox, Salesforce Base Connector, Salesforce PFG
Adapter, and Salesforce Auth Plugin) to do just that.
This talk will introduce the use cases where Plone can benefit from CRM integration, Salesforce.com's
ability to model an organization's business processes, and how, where and why they can and do
compliment each other. This has everything to do with choosing the best of breed CRM and CMS and
using them together to transform your organization. Why build it from scratch, when you can integrate it
with Plone?
About Me
Program Manager at ONE/Northwest [1]
Tools and strategies to engage people in protecting the environment
We are a non-profit and the aforementioned tools are our services for non-profits
Content Management and Plone are central (as are CRM and Salesforce.com)
At least 130+ small to medium Plone sites
More of the integrator than developer community
[1] http://www.onenw.org
About Me (continued)
Plone community participation
Helped organize Plone Conference 2006 in Seattle
Seattle Plone user group co-founder
Sprint and Plone Bootcamp coordination (Seattle, Vancouver)
Plone foundation member
Some Add-on products: PressRoom, eCards, and several Salesforce integration tools we'll talk
1 of 8 10/6/07 7:35 PM

2. Plone + Salesforce.com: Best of breed applications working in harm... file:///Volumes/iDisk/Documents/plonecon/plone_and_salesforce.html
about today
Talk Outline
Our talk consists of 3 parts:
Background; What's the motivation?
What can we do today? (Demos)
What does the future hold?
Part 1: Background; What's the motivation?
Why are we talking about CRM at a CMS conference?
Whereby I will try and answer that question
But first ... a disclaimer
Salesforce.com happened to me.
I'm a Plone integrator.
I don't strategize about CRM use-cases. I don't even know that much about relational databases -- thank
you ZODB
What is CRM?
Stands for quot;Customer Relationship Managementquot; and has traditionally meant processes for capture,
storage, and analysis of customer/vendor/partner relationships (adapted from: Wikipedia )
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management
2 of 8 10/6/07 7:35 PM

3. Plone + Salesforce.com: Best of breed applications working in harm... file:///Volumes/iDisk/Documents/plonecon/plone_and_salesforce.html
Gauge the audience on their familiarity with CRM, Salesforce.com
*Constituent* centric operations
A constituent could be a business, a partner, a colleague, a volunteer, a vendor, a donor, a client, etc...
CRM-applications include sales, but also customer support, donor management, human resources,
volunteer management, event participation, etc...
I'm from the Nonprofit sector, so we call them constituents --> Symbolic of all encompassing nature.
Increasingly, this interaction is happening *online* (donations, support ticket tracking, newsletter
signups, RFPs, product feedback, surveys)
Two obvious paths
Build it
Integrate it
Why not build it with Plone-the-framework?
<$0.02 € 0.02>
Content management itself is hard.
Think about every other process an organization or company is involved in. Each item could be equally
or more complex than their Content Management needs.
</$0.02 €0.02>
Mention the existence of several abandoned, simple, half-finished quot;contactquot; Archetypes-based projects
open sourced for Plone. So, I would argue we want to integrate.
This is not crmmatrix.org
I'm assuming you're here because:
You already or will soon use Salesforce.com
You're a Plone developer exploring the CRM options to compliment your consulting offerings or
are an organization considering Salesforce.com
You care about Plone's integration with others as a strategic problem-space for the platform
I'm not going to astound you with my matrix of features that make Salesforce.com the best choice for
you.
Why Salesforce.com might be a good option
3 of 8 10/6/07 7:35 PM

4. Plone + Salesforce.com: Best of breed applications working in harm... file:///Volumes/iDisk/Documents/plonecon/plone_and_salesforce.html
It's quot;openquot; for a proprietary CRM (50%+ API traffic, almost full coverage of UI through the API,
both open source and proprietary 3rd party vendors (AppExchange), trust.salesforce.com
(transparent uptime data))
It's big and small in the right ways (Big: 35k+ customers incl. Dell, Japan Post, Electronic Arts,
UN World Food Programme; Small: Salesforce Foundation doles out 10-seat licenses to NPOs
(international too))
It's an application and a framework
It's not just a U.S. thing (14 languages)
It's hosted, incl. upgrades & BBB managed by Salesforce.com
People care about getting it to work well with Plone
It's fun to work with
You should think carefully about this decision on your own too. In otherwords, YMMV.
Part 2: What can we do today? (Demos)
Live demos: proceed with caution
4 of 8 10/6/07 7:35 PM

5. Plone + Salesforce.com: Best of breed applications working in harm... file:///Volumes/iDisk/Documents/plonecon/plone_and_salesforce.html
A Form Generator for a Database
The Stack
5 of 8 10/6/07 7:35 PM

6. Plone + Salesforce.com: Best of breed applications working in harm... file:///Volumes/iDisk/Documents/plonecon/plone_and_salesforce.html
Beatbox
$ easy_install beatbox
$ python2.4
>>> # testing existence of beatbox
>>> import beatbox; dir(beatbox)
Salesforce Base Connector
6 of 8 10/6/07 7:35 PM

7. Plone + Salesforce.com: Best of breed applications working in harm... file:///Volumes/iDisk/Documents/plonecon/plone_and_salesforce.html
Demos: 1) Setting up the Salesforce Base Connector, 2) Using it via zopectl debug
Salesforce PFG Adapter
Demos: 1) Multiple adapters, 2) Emails from contacts (do we have Evite for Plone?)
Salesforce Auth Plugin
7 of 8 10/6/07 7:35 PM

8. Plone + Salesforce.com: Best of breed applications working in harm... file:///Volumes/iDisk/Documents/plonecon/plone_and_salesforce.html
Demos: Authenticate off an account, change the soql statement, try authenticating again
Part 3: What does the future hold?
1. What do we want to accomplish? (event registration, comment tracking, what does it mean to blur
the lines between Plone content and Salesforce.com content?)
2. What needs to happen? Maturity; Transition out of framework stage (Beatbox/Base Connector/PFG
Adapter/Auth Plugin makes you do all the thinking and work)
3. Bring interested people and resources to the project. Anyone want to sprint on Saturday?
alpha/beta releases of all tools
Bring beatbox up to >= Apex Web Services API 8.0 (http://snipurl.com/plonesfapi8)
Resources
Signup for this --> http://groups.google.com/group/plonesf
Browse these:
http://snipurl.com/plonesfapex
http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/PloneSalesforce
http://snipurl.com/plonesfproducts
http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/api/index.htm
8 of 8 10/6/07 7:35 PM