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The Salesforce Suite of Drupal modules is an easy way to connect Drupal to Salesforce, a Customer Relationship Management system used by retailers and non-profits alike, which allows non-technical staff to create extensive reports – reports that would be difficult to create using Drupal alone.

Although entities can be synchronized to Salesforce objects – and custom mappings created – there is lots more that can be done with Salesforce. Let’s take a look.

Getting started

For openers, you’ll need:

• A Developer Edition account;
• The Salesforce Drupal module;
• A Drupal development site.

To get the Developer Edition, create a developer account.

Once you’re in Salesforce, you’ll quickly notice that the site seems overwhelming. A complete overview is way beyond the scope of this article; the most important objects for our purposes are Campaigns, Leads, Contacts, and Cases.

There are many other extensions for Salesforce, extensions that provide new object types. Also, existing object types can be extended in much the same way as in Drupal.

As a best practice, always work in a sandbox environment when not working within a dev instance. It will help ensure that you can create a proper development -> testing -> production workflow.

To create a sandbox (Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Database.com), go to Setup » Sandboxes » Create new Sandbox.