Speedy and Effective Salesforce Data Migration Using Salesforce Lightning Connect
Over the years, Salesforce has become the most widely adopted and accepted CRM solution, thanks to its scalability, customizability and effectiveness.
One of the premier aspects of Salesforce is Lightning Connect; it makes the entire migration and integration process really simple. The Lightning Connect migration tool is definitely worth checking out and mastering over time, as it facilitates easy real time data integration.
Instead of adopting the time-consuming and inefficient traditional model, Lightning Connect revolutionizes data migration by gathering external Salesforce objects and mapping them to the data tables of the new system.
When Should I Use Lightning Connect?
Lightning Connect definitely is useful when you wish to transfer all your system standards, but don’t want to carry all the unnecessary junk data in the Salesforce Organization. If your new operation would require you to fetch small chunks or packets of data from time to time, it’s a good idea to use Lightning Connect. It is also a very good idea to adopt this service if you will be looking for real-time or quick data access. By cutting down on irrelevant data accumulation, it drastically slashes access times too. Lightning Connect facilitates seamless integration across a variety of platforms too.
How Does It Work?
Lightning Connect accesses data by reference, which allows real-time access. You can gather information across several external sources, ranging from SAP to Microsoft PowerPoint and integrate it onto one Salesforce platform as External Objects. To set it up, the following steps are to be followed:
- Head over to the Setup section, and type in External Data Sources in the bar which says Quick Find.
- Select External Data Sources, and then click New External Data Source, or edit if you want to modify another source.
- Fill in the necessary details.
- Next, choose an authentication protocol. You could choose Password Authentication, or select OAuth 2.0.
- Click Save and then select “validate and sync”. This completes the entire process.
- You could perform the following actions by selecting tables and clicking Sync too:
- Creating any external object automatically.
- Creating any custom field for each column on a Salesforce metadata field-type compatible table automatically.
- Now, these External Objects can be accessed in exactly the same way as Standard or Custom Objects on Salesforce. They can be accessed in detail pages, list views, record feeds and Visualforce. You can now create links between External and Normal Objects.
With Lightning Connect you have a platform to seamlessly integrate, as well as collaborate, all legacy data and optimize the chatter feeds found on pages for External Objects. You can read more about the data migrator at http://www.flosum.com/salesforce-data-migrator/.
The OData Concept and Lightning Connect
The Open Data Protocol (OData) standard is used by Salesforce in Lightning Connect. This is an OASIS standard, and it makes optimum use of RESTful APIs. By building these APIs, the standard helps you focus on business logic rather than low level implementation details like status codes, response or request headers, media types, URL conventions, query options, HTTP methods etc. Microsoft and SAP have also adopted and begun implementation of OData, and hence are fully compatible.
As mentioned earlier, integration into the Salesforce platform has been around for years, but with Lightning Connect, you can change the entire game in your favor and treat all external data the same way you deal with native objects. It is from the same platform which uses APEX triggers, SOSL, SOQL, Lookup Relationships and more. It is lightweight and quite fantastic to use.
Among the several organizations that have adopted and implemented lightning connect; enterprises which make use of real-time updates for large quantities of external data have benefited the most. Lightning Connect is most suited to handling read operations with ease and speed.
Author: The author has over ten years’ experience as a customer relationship management software expert, and has written articles shared on many platforms throughout the Internet. Visit http://www.flosum.com/salesforce-data-migrator/ to learn more about data migration using Salesforce, and other relevant information.
