The Salesforce platform can be used for a wide variety of business processes, and is the foundation of many enterprise business systems for customers across both public and private sectors. Salesforce functionality may be used to support a customer relationship management system, a public-facing permitting system, or a technical support desk function within an organization. In these cases, and in many other system types, Esri users are interested in integrating with Salesforce to enrich or support their workflows.
There are a variety of ways to work with Salesforce and ArcGIS, many of which are described in greater detail below.
Salesforce Maps is a user interface solution that provides basic mapping, territory design and route optimization within Salesforce. Salesforce Maps is built with the ArcGIS Maps SDK for Javascript and uses basemaps from ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Location Platform along with Living Atlas data. Users are also able to log-in using their ArcGIS Online subscription and add their own private content to this application, while visualizing Salesforce assets with spatial attributes in the same interface.
Salesforce is also currently developing additional features for their Field Service mobile application, which is used on iOS and Android devices. By adding direct Esri integration to this application, mobile users will be able to access ArcGIS maps and services directly within their Salesforce workflow, adding context and awareness of geographic features to whatever workflow they are supporting with Field Service.
Another common method for bringing ArcGIS interfaces or datasets into a Salesforce experience is to embed an ArcGIS web application in an <iframe> element. This can be configured in several ways in Salesforce, including as an Apex coding pattern, and the embedded application can be dynamically defined to include URL parameters or configurations based on the Salesforce object or item that a user is accessing.
For more recommendations on this integration, see the pattern to Embed ArcGIS applications. For Salesforce use cases, especially if the embedded application requires a user login or authentication step, be especially careful to review the recommendations related to Single Sign-On.
Potential use cases for this pattern include:
Embedding an ArcGIS web application that loads a customer’s address and displays a map when viewing a customer details page in Salesforce
A feature editing application, built with ArcGIS Experience Builder, which loads as part of a permitting solution, supporting a step where a user must draw a boundary before returning to the Salesforce form view for further data entry.
A company can review their policy information alongside maps of flooding risk and policy coverage locations, to better understand the context and potential geographic implications of a change in approach or coverage.
To work with Salesforce datasets or concepts in an ArcGIS client, the most common integration pattern involves a scheduled or on-demand ETL process which can pull datasets from Salesforce and either create new features in ArcGIS or update existing features based on the business logic of the data. This pattern can be very effective as it creates ArcGIS-native datasets that can then be used across ArcGIS client applications. ETLs should be designed to run on a regular schedule, so changes in Salesforce are quickly available to ArcGIS users.
The last common integration pattern between ArcGIS and Salesforce systems involves the use of workflow steps and links to work between several related, but independent applications.
For example, users of ArcGIS Survey123 may work with a link in their application interface, as part of a form, that sends them to the Salesforce Field Service mobile app on the same device, pre-creating a URL that takes the user to the exact customer record that has been identified. This process builds on deep linking.