Salesforce.com Deltek Vision Integration

Background:
Our client was implementing Salesforce.com for their sales and marketing efforts. They wished to use Salesforce as their primary CRM tool going forward as well, but wanted to keep all project management and accounting functions in their existing Deltek Vision system.

Problem:
The existing Vision data for Clients, Contacts, Opportunities, Projects, and Activities were to be brought over into Salesforce. Going forward all new information related to Clients, Contacts and Opportunities were to be created in Salesforce and then brought down to Vision. Projects were to be created and managed in Vision. Additionally, read only access to Projects needed to be available in Salesforce. The middleware tool, Informatica.com, did not support Stored Procedures in the current release.

TnK Group's Solution:
We determined the best solution was to make views for the initial data upload and future inserts and updates to projects from Vision. We created Views that had the required information, filtered as necessary. For the initial upload, we retrieved the Salesforce ID’s of the newly created records and stored them in custom fields in Vision. We then created the push from Salesforce to Vision. We created a separate table in Vision for each of the incoming objects from Salesforce. Behind these tables we wrote a trigger on insert that would then determine whether the arriving record was either new or an update and then would perform the appropriate action. The final process was to upload new and edited projects to Salesforce from Vision; to accomplish this process, we utilized the same view in Vision and the same procedure in Informatica modified to only take data changed since the last upload. We also added a process to retrieve the newly created Salesforce ID to store in Vision for future use.