Unite Customer-Facing Apps with a Salesforce Backend: Heroku Connect in Practice

 Gordon Jackson, Principle Architect – Heroku  gjackson@salesforce.com

 

Tom Scott, VP Appirio Thursday, September 17, 2:00 - 2:40 Moscone West, 2006

Introductions

Heroku Connect: Seamless Data Sync between Force.com & PostgresQL

Heroku Connect Syncs Directly to Salesforce Clouds Seamless two-way data between customer-facing apps and your business on Salesforce

Employee Apps Customer Apps

Heroku Connect

About Diageo, Appirio & the Mobile Survey App

Diageo is a global leader ($21B revenue in 2014) in beverage alcohol with iconic brands in spirits, beer and wine.

About Diageo

Who is Appirio

Cloud & Crowd Strategy | Technology Implementation | Systems Integration Custom Development | Management Consulting | Change Enablement

More than 3.5 million users and 900 enterprises moved to the cloud

WHY?

•  Capture field intelligence from retail stores in order to evaluate distribution partner performance against goals and use as input to business decision-making.

HOW?

•  iOS and Android app for field sales to answer surveys about retail pricing, positioning, special displays, etc.

•  Salesforce as authoritative source of survey and result data. Heroku and Heroku Connect to act as “service layer” for mobile app.

WHEN?

•  October 2013 original rollout; now in version 3 with 100k+ surveys/month.

Diageo Mobile Survey App

The App in Action

•  Login; Nearby accounts; Survey List, Answer questions (types, photo), Review, Offline Live Demo

Salesforce Survey Setup

Salesforce Survey Question Creation

Salesforce Results

Salesforce Results

Application Architecture

Architecture Diagram

•  Why Heroku?

•  Scalability (10k to 100+k overnight), licensing, de-couple db for better mobile UX

•  Why Heroku Connect?

•  SFDC as master source for contacts, surveys/questions, results

•  Building integration code would take months and significant budget

•  Why Custom App?

•  Need Diageo-specific UX – everything from app icon to fully custom branding and UX

•  Hybrid – speed to market and need for both iOS and Android support

•  Environment Management?

•  Multiple full stack environments for dev, test, prod (mobile app, heroku, heroku connect, sfdc sandboxes)

Mobile Survey Solution Architecture - FAQ

•  Benefits

•  Very simple to setup and configure

•  Simply does its job – synchronize data between SFDC and Heroku

•  Issues Encountered

•  Sept 2013 – 10 min delay before Contact data available in Postgres (now can be real-time w/streaming API)

•  Nov 2013 – failed during SFDC maintenance (now self-corrects)

•  Mar 2014 – switch from CloudConnect to HerokuConnect and default schema name change

•  Nov 2014 – DB upgrade – bug restricted change of Postgres DB without re-install

•  Mar 2015 – DB upgrade – delay provisioning new HC instance

•  Apr 2015 – issue with related data creation when we populate NAME field (HC now protects against this)

• 

Heroku Connect Lessons Learned

Q & A

www.heroku.com/connect

Thank you