Business goals
Master? One way transfer? Both ways? Transfer? Sync?
Mapping
Handle issues, future changes field mismatch etc
New API? Get contact
User storiess
Ask customer:
Sign up in Canvas.
Add applications, to avoid handling credentials
Notify you
For now: Send us email, we add to your org., let you manage
You can debug, add apps, add workflows, to client accounts
They will not see other accounts, or your account, but you can see theirs
Dashboard you can see workflow health status for your org. "Workflow Health Status"
Not recommended to add all workflows to your own account, but to add it to the own companies accounts
Let them access
Many benefits
In today’s meeting we discussed best practices for scoping integrations and onboarding customers.
I made a little list of some of the common questions that we bring up in meetings with customers we are building integrations for:
What data do they want to transfer?
What are their expectations for the integration? (ask for “user stories”)
Which application will be the master for the data?
Is the transfer one-way? Or will a separate workflow transfer some data back the other direction?
Will the data be transferred once (just created), or will there be a continuous synchronization (updates and deletions)?
How will data be matched between applications?
For example, for employees, will they be matched by employee number? Or email address?
For other data items, will there be a unique ID in each system that can be used to link objects?
How will fields be mapped?
If the integration is completely new, a mapping table must be created with input from the customer. For example, you may provide the customer with a spreadsheet listing the fields in SameSystem, and ask them to fill out the corresponding fields in the other application. The customer probably does not know the name of the fields in the API, but this can usually be deduced by a technical person reading the description, and by asking some follow-up questions.
For fields with future changes (“dynamic fields”) some extra consideration needs to be taken when mapping:
If the destination API does not support a time dimension for the values, alternative solutions must be evaluated – for example scheduling future changes (via myVault, as shown in today’s demo), or creating “change reports” that will be sent to the customer for manual follow-up.