To paraphrase John Donne – no Salesforce implementation is an island. Typically, Salesforce is part of a company’s systems “continent” and the need to integrate it with other applications is a common one.

An integration can be as simple as the requirement to update a Salesforce record from an external system or as complex as creating an order in a remote system after it’s created in Salesforce and waiting for a response from that remote system. Each integration scenario is completely unique, but there do exist archetypes or patterns for integration.

That’s where Integration Patterns and Practices comes in. This guide is new in Winter ’13, and it addresses these common integration scenarios:

• UI Update Based on Data Changes
• Remote Process Invocation – Request and Reply
• Remote Process Invocation – Fire and Forget
• Batch Data Synchronization
• Remote Call-In

In addition to these patterns and best practices, you’ll also find a matrix to help you select the pattern that best matches your scenario based on your source and target systems, whether you’re integrating processes or data, and whether you need synchronous or asynchronous integration.

This document was created by experienced Salesforce field architects and implementers, and contains the patterns and best practices that they’ve developed from working with Salesforce integrations over the years.

If you think you’ll be integrating Salesforce with at least one other application or system, check it out!