We’ve recently published a tutorial showing how you could use IBM App Connect to simplify access to your Salesforce data, so it can used with an IBM Business Process Manager (BPM) process application.
When you create a process application, you want to focus on business value, not on the complexity of the underlying technology. Although modern cloud-based applications such as Salesforce typically come with web-based APIs that intend to make integration easier, the full APIs are still complex to use with subtle error handling and relatively complex data models. Often process designers want a specific and simple use case of an API.
One of the key features of IBM BPM is it’s ability to create processes code-free. With IBM App Connect, you can take the code-free approach one step further, utilizing its intuitive graphical interface to create and extend your connections to external services in a code-free manner. You could consider IBM App Connect as the “cloud connector” for IBM BPM, simplifying interaction with cloud-based applications. By using IBM App Connect, you can compose APIs in a code-free flow designer and make use of smart connectors to a wide range of common Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, including Salesforce, as demonstrated in the tutorial.
While the tutorial shows a relatively simple example, you can easily imagine the possibilities to extend it. You could easily enhance the API we’ve exposed to add further calls to Salesforce or indeed to any other cloud application to enrich the response, or combine it with cognitive capabilities to do language translation or sentiment analysis. It is instantly available for secure re-use by other processes and applications.
For more information, take a look at the tutorial here.