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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

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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