Salesforce Connect

Skip the swivel-chair work. With Salesforce Connect, you surface live records from your ERP, billing, or custom APIs directly in the workspaces your teams already use. Start in Setup, open the External Service Wizard, point it at an OpenAPI or REST endpoint, authenticate, and auto-generate actions you can call. Drop those actions into Flow or a Lightning page and map fields with simple drag-and-drop. Data stays in its source system - queries run when needed - so you avoid copies and nightly jobs while giving users a complete customer snapshot inside Salesforce.

For daily execution, design a page that blends external facts with CRM context. On an Account, show current orders from ERP, open balances from finance, and shipment status from logistics. Add quick actions to create a case, submit an RMA through the connected service, or schedule a follow-up. On phone or tablet, reps scan documents, capture photos, and update notes at the curb; everything is sent through the same secure connections. Use list views and Flow screens to filter by external attributes (for example, renewals due in 30 days with unpaid balance) and fire tasks without leaving the record.

Developers and product teams connect apps to Salesforce in minutes with Heroku Connect. Map Salesforce objects to Heroku Postgres tables, choose read-only or bidirectional sync, and let the service handle polling, streaming, and conflict resolution. Build a Node, Python, or Ruby app against Postgres while the connector reflects changes to and from Salesforce automatically. Use this to power customer portals, event registration, or usage dashboards without custom ETL. When promoting from staging to production, reuse mappings and apply selective sync to keep volumes efficient.

Automation should run on signals, not timers. Define event channels that listen to status changes from external systems and publish them into Salesforce. In Flow, subscribe to those events to update records, send Slack alerts, or kick off approvals. When a payment clears in your billing platform, set Opportunity to Closed Won, generate the invoice PDF, and notify the account team - no polling required. Need downstream replication? Forward the same events to data lakes or analytics tools so finance and BI see updates within seconds, with centralized monitoring and retries to stay resilient.