Obviously, it is important to have a single source of truth for your IT data. This is what made Elements Connect app (formerly nFeed) one of the leading products on the Atlassian Marketplace, as it is able to query data from any datasource. You can have custom fields integrated into your Jira instances that you can connect to a SQL database, a REST API, a user directory, any Atlassian application, etc. The benefit is simple yet significant: users do not have to copy and paste values from an external tool to fill fields with values that are already stored elsewhere. You gain of time and have less errors, so everybody is happy.
Yet until today, Elements Connect only offered technical connectors. However your databases, REST API, etc. are usually part of common IT tools; Salesforce was an example that came up regularly for our team. What would happen if we simplified the technical configuration so users only needed to focus on customizing the business part of the configuration?
Meet Elements Connect Salesforce
Elements Connect Salesforce is a free extension for Elements Connect, whose purpose is to ease the configuration of fields when using Salesforce as a datasource. With this new product, we hope that our users will be able to focus more on their business tasks rather than tedious technical tasks.
While it was possible to connect Salesforce to Elements Connect before today, the configuration looked something like this:
Now with Elements Connect Salesforce, technical aspects of the configuration – such as the URL encoding of the query and locating the attributes in resulting JSON with JSON Path queries – have disappeared! Administrators are only asked to configure two things:
- The query to get data from Salesforce
- The template for how Elements Connect should display the results to the user
And that’s it! Now your configuration looks like this:
Elements Connect Salesforce: Your Salesforce Jira connector in action
Let’s take a practical look as how Elements Connect Salesforce works.
Pocket Art is a fictional company that builds and sells audio guides to museums. They use Jira Software to manage their hardware and software developments projects and Jira Service Desk to provide first-class support to their customers. Although Jira can be used for many purpose, they use Salesforce as a CRM to store information regarding their customers, assets and account managers.
This is where our story begins: on one hand we have the business data in Salesforce, and on the other hand Jira is used by customers, developers and the support team to manage issues related to their assets.
Let’s see how Elements Connect Salesforce connects the right people to the relevant data – all within Jira.
Issue creation with Elements Connect Salesforce
In a perfect world, everything would work correctly – however hardware breaks and bugs happen.
Our customer notices that he can’t hear the sound on his audio guide. Yet he keeps his cool – all he needs to do is log into Pocket Art’s support portal and file a ticket by selecting the “Support request” link.
In the form, he first selects the Product concerned. The list is retrieved from Salesforce and only suggests product owned by the current user.
Once a product is selected, he selects the affected Device by typing its serial number in the second field. In this field, Elements Connect also displays all devices owned by the customer.
Elements Connect Salesforce helps the agent resolve the issue
During the create issue transition, Elements Connect sets the value of three readonly fields: Phone number, Account owner and Customer priority. Based on the email address of the reporter, Elements Connect queries Salesforce to get the relevant information.
- Customer priority: The level of support offered to the customer, which is used by the service manager to configure the Jira Service Desk queues
- Phone number: If needed, this information will be used by agent to call the customer.
- Account owner: This user field will create a dashboard for the account managers
Integrate Salesforce and Jira today!
Elements Connect Salesforce is our first extension for Elements Connect, yet we have others in mind so watch this space. Do you have comments on Elements Connect Salesforce or would like to see another integration added to our roadmap? We’d love to know your thoughts, so leave us a message!
Try Elements Connect Salesforce
