CRM Integration With the Big 3 in JavaScript

CRM Integration With Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and SugarCRM

As a developer, creating tools can be cathartic, because you get to make an impact that multiplies. If you’re looking to make a real impact, you’ll need to create a tool that gets used, and it might actually make you some money. CRMs are an excellent place for integrations and, fortunately, it’s not very hard to work with each CRM when you know where to look. Let’s break the resistance of turning ideas into products by going over how to integrate your software with some of the most popular CRMs on the market in the fastest way possible (if you’re still new to CRMs, take a look at this wiki page with resources on types of CRMs to get you started). Though you could use a myriad of languages, we’ll be focused on the most popular programming language in the world, JavaScript.

You might be saying, “Each of those services already has documentation on how to write integrations, why can’t I just use those?” Though you’re right, as we can’t get away from their documentation and how they define abstract concepts, you’ve probably never seen their docs. Most of the links are to external articles, as well as explaining basic ideas, like how to create JSON objects, which is far too remedial for most developers. You'll be blocked from delivering a useful integration in any reasonable time. The best resource is to go off the beaten path. The key lies in open source.

Integrating With Salesforce

Let's take a look at using JSForce.

JSForce is a well documented open source library for integrating with the vast SalesForce API. The SalesForce API is an enormous spectrum, including Analytics, Reporting, Clients, and complex pipelines. For those of you well versed in the nouns that make up SalesForce, you can find methods on each to get info. For more advanced use cases you can even query the data directly.

Example of JSForce - Logging in and performing a SQL query against your CRM:

Integrating With Microsoft Dynamics

Let's look at using DynamicsWebAPI.

DynamicsWebAPI, created by Microsoft Certified Professional Aleksandr Rogov, provides a way to integrate with Dynamics 365 (online), Dynamics 365 (on-premises), Dynamics CRM 2016, and Dynamics CRM Online. Though you can’t perform raw SQL, there are plenty of ways to select data, run functions, and perform actions on this CRM. You have access to all the functions you can call by name. Once authenticated with your token, it’s trivial to get helpful information.

Example of DynamicsWebAPI - Logging a TimeZone Code by calling the associated function, GetTimeZoneCodeByLocalizedName:

Integrating With SugarCRM

In this section, we'll be discussing a library named Ventana.

SugarCRM is no stranger to open source. On GitHub, they have a strong presence with tools like Thorn, and BuildingBlocks. Their API client Ventana (Spanish for Window), allows you to interact with your SugarCRM REST API.

Example of Ventana - Logging in and fetching Accounts records:

In Summary

Open source libraries allow you to take hours of research and turn it into hours of product refinement. With only a few lines of code, we can tie into a great CRM and start working with the data. A great kudos is owed to each of these libraries and their maintainers.