We cut a “0.9 Alpha” release of the SalesforceConnector for Plone today, just in the nick of time to demo it at Dreamforce.
Thanks to the generous support of the Salesforce Foundation, we were able to work with our friends at Enfold Systems to build a product for Plone that allows you to:
- Authenticate Plone users against data stored in Salesforce.com
- Store new Plone users in Salesforce.com
- Access user profile data stored in Salesforce.com
SalesforceConnector does this by taking advantage of Salesforce.com’s powerful web services API, which allows external applications to easily access and maniuplate Salesforce data. We also used Simon Fell’s product “Beatbox” which provides a Python wrapper for the Salesforce API.
SalesforceConnector still has a few issues that we intend to resolve before cutting a 1.0 release in late October, but it is suitable for testing and experimentation. It uses a lot of leading-edge Plone technology including PlonePAS, formlib and Zope3 views, so be sure to brush up on these before diving in. 
I also just learned that salesforce has a program for non-profits to apply for free licenses – http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/salesforce/non_profits.html
There is so much buzz around the non-profit use of this tool – I would love to hear more about what kinds of interesting things people are doing with it.
/jsb
That’s a great news! Thank you very much! vds.
Jonah (and others)
For more info about what non-profits are doing with salesforce, check out the blog of Jon’s colleague (and mine) Steve Andersen at gokubi.com.
Hi all!
Any idea when 1.0 will be released?
Wasn’t it slated to be released in Jan 07?
[...] My colleague Andrew Burkhalter has posted the first part of an update on our work to integrate Plone with Salesforce.com. [...]