Berry
Salesforce.com Integration: A Microsoft BizTalk Server Case Study
The Berry Company's vision is to deliver more local leads to more businesses than
any other source, regardless of platform. Berry is ahead of the curve, providing
innovative, local lead-generating print and online search solutions that help businesses
thrive and consumers find the service providers and products they need.
Berry brings a full range of print; Internet and local search solutions, and provides
cost-effective options that deliver other calls and clicks to your business. We
put your business in front of potential customers-wherever and however they are
searching.
For nearly 100 years, Berry has offered exceptional service, local market expertise,
and a constantly expanding family of product offerings. From our roots as a pioneer
of the Yellow Pages industry, to the cutting edge suite of digital marketing products
we offer today, Berry has sent generations of customers in one direction-yours.
Overview
- County or Region: United States
- Industry: Publishing
- Customer Profile:
Berry brings a full range of print; Internet and local search solutions, and provides
cost-effective options that deliver other calls and clicks to your business. We
put your business in front of potential customers-wherever and however they are
searching.
- Business Situation:
The Berry Company decided to use Salesforce.com as their CRM vendor due to their
maturity in the industry, large customer base, powerful user interface, and high
customer satisfaction.
- Solution:
Berry implemented Microsoft¨ BizTalk Server 2009 to help integrate various software
applications and interfaces.
- Benefits:
Reusable Components
Support for Multiple Message Types
Transport Independence
Scalability and High Availability
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Case Study
- Situation
The Berry Company decided to use Salesforce.com as their CRM vendor due to their
maturity in the industry, large customer base, powerful user interface, and high
customer satisfaction. The next step necessary was to get content to Salesforce.com's
data store so that Berry's sales representatives could work, while updating the
legacy system with changes and additions to the data. Berry's store of legacy data
was quite large, and speed of throughput was very important, making the choice of
middleware critical. Berry also required a custom Salesforce.com solution which
drove the need for highly flexible and adaptable middleware.
- Solution
The Berry Company reviewed several different integration technology options, and
chose BizTalk Server 2009 based on its versatility, maintainability, and ability
to interface with Berry and all of their vendors. Innovative Architects helped Berry
implement a BizTalk Server solution that could rapidly load data from the legacy
store to Salesforce.com. Berry's sales reps could work with the data and any modifications
would be sent back to the legacy system to keep the two systems in synch. The middleware
handled all of the mapping of the data between legacy and Salesforce.com, as well
as implemented error handling by interfacing with a third party monitoring service.
- Benefits
Administration Tools
The administrative tools are vastly improved in BizTalk Server 2009. These tools
have been improved enough that they could be considered an administrative framework
with their own benefits for administrative and operations teams.
Support for Multiple Message Types
BizTalk's internal message format is almost always XML but it has facilities for
working with flat-file documents as well. Binary messages are also supported in
pass-through scenarios or by using specific techniques for using them in orchestrations.
Transport Independence
Messages are almost always transformed to an XML format as they come into BizTalk.
Additionally, orchestrations support the ability to use logical ports that aren't
tied to specific protocols, applications, or endpoints. Both of these options provide
support for implementing orchestrations generically without regard to the transport
(adapter) that messages come through. There are many benefits related to this but
the most important one is the opportunity for reuse when additional systems need
to participate in a business process that has already been implemented in BizTalk.
In some cases, no new development will be required.
Scalability and High Availability
BizTalk has been architected to be highly available with features such as multiple
BizTalk processes, multiple BizTalk servers in a farm, clustered BizTalk services),
and using SQL Server as its data repository. When implemented correctly, BizTalk
applications will never lose a message (not that a message won't fail during processing).
BizTalk servers can also be easily added to existing BizTalk farms, which makes
scale-out easy. It's also easy to add additional BizTalk processes and endpoints
that can improve availability and throughput.
Tracking
This feature is essentially an auditing feature that can record message bodies and
message context, as well as each step that a message went through in BizTalk. This
feature can be very important in compliance scenarios involving HIPAA and SOX. Developers
and IT administrators also use tracking data for debugging BizTalk applications.
- Software and Services
• Microsoft CRM
• Microsoft BizTalk Server
• Microsoft SQL Server
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