Loyal readers (assuming I have any) will doubtless recall that one of our projects this summer at ONE/Northwest has been building a product to connect websites powered by the Plone content management with user databases stored in Salesforce.com.

I’m pleased to announce that Andrew, Steve and I have just finished our initial testing and review of the alpha version of “SalesforceConnector” have found it to be pretty darn good. Or at least it works, which is pretty darn good in my book.

We should have a beta release to share with you in mid-September. We’ve still got some unit tests to write, some documentation to re-write, and various bits of packaging and housekeeping to attend to. We also want to make sure we understand the Zope 3 subsystems that the product uses well enough to answer in the inevitable questions about customization.

Bottom line: it’s close, and we’re even running ahead of schedule. Stay tuned. We will announce the beta widely on plone.org and on the plone-users email list. Some initial detials:

• You’ll need Plone 2.5 or higher and Zope 2.9.3 or higher. (Update: Thanks to some helpful advice from Rocky Burt, Nate Aune, and Josh LaPlace, we now believe that Plone 2.1.3+, Zope 2.9.3+, and Five 1.4.1+ should also work, but we haven’t yet tested this configuration.)
• You’ll need Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition (because that’s the lowest product tier that offers the Web Services API) or a Developer account.
• SalesforceConnector will let you:

• Store new Plone users directly in Salesforce.com
• Update user data in Salesforce from Plone
• Log in Plone users in by consulting data stored in Salesforce.com
• Look up user data stored in Salesforce.com from Plone
• Collect any custom user data fields in Plone and store them in Salesforce.com

Good stuff, eh? I’m pretty excited about the possibilities this is going to unleash.

We’ve been able to do this work thanks to a grant from the Salesforce.com Foundation and are fortunate to be working with our partners at Enfold Systems who have done most of the heavy technical lifting. Many thanks to both of them.

If you can think of a better name for it than “SalesforceConnector”, please let me know. Releasing software is hard; good names are even harder.