How to use Salesforce to Salesforce Automation with Informatica Cloud

Salesforce to Salesforce is a native force.com feature to share data records in real time between two Force.com environments (orgs). For example, two business partners may want to collaborate by sharing accounts and opportunity data within their orgs. It is very easy to share the data using Salesforce to Salesforce feature. 

In most scenarios, data can be shared using the standard Salesforce.com user interface manually. A user creates an account in one org, clicks the external sharing button, selects the appropriate org connection and then shares the record. This involves some manual effort and when sales reps are working on lot of records, the manual sharing process can become a painful exercise and that may cause some user adoption issues in the long run.

There are two objects which are controlling the Salesforce to Salesforce feature at the backend:

• PartnerNetworkConnection - Represents a Salesforce to Salesforce connection between Salesforce organizations
• PartnerNetworkRecordConnection – Represents a record shared between two Salesforce Orgs using Salesforce to Salesforce.

Whenever the user shares a record using Salesforce to Salesforce, a record gets created in PartnerNetworkRecordConnection object.

Informatica Cloud can be used to make this integration between two Salesforce orgs seamless and automatic.  The process flow will be as follows: 
 

• User creates the records (which need to be shared) in his org.
• As soon as the record is created, a workflow is kicked off which sends an outbound message.
• This outbound message will initiate an Informatica Cloud task.
• The Informatica Cloud task will insert the record details (created in setp -1) in the PartnerNetworkRecordConnection object.
• As soon as the record gets created in PartnerNetworkRecordConnection, it is shared with the Partner Org.

Thus, the records created in one org are automatically shared to the Partner Org in near real time without any manual intervention.

Overall, the benefits of using Informatica Cloud are:
 

• Data Synchronization achieved through the use of out of the box functionality.
• Centralizes Integration Logic and no need of writing custom VF/Apex code for automating Salesforce to Salesforce feature.
• Record Selection criteria for sharing can be easily defined using filters.
• Exception handling of failed records can be set up to monitor the record sharing status.
• Scalable approach.

So if you are considering implementing Salesforce to Salesforce feature to share records automatically, you can consider the Informatica Cloud approach as described above.

Feel free to reach out to comment for any clarification or questions.