Salesforce Integration Architect Part 1 : Evaluate the Current System Landscape

The Integration Architect Certification is a credential developed for Salesforce professionals who have knowledge, skills, and experience implementing integration solutions on the Salesforce platform and are looking to verify their expertise to further advance their career in this area. There are 6 areas of knowledge that are covered by the Salesforce Integration Architect certification. Today we will talk about Part 1 Evaluate the Current System Landscape .

• Given a set of business requirements, identify the current system landscape and determine what standards, limitations, boundaries and protocols exist.

A system landscape may consist of remote systems that must comply with certain standards and protocols required for integration. In addition, certain boundaries or limitations could also affect the integration of systems. For instance, synchronous Apex SOAP callouts require the remote system to be compatible with the web service standards supported by Salesforce, which are WSDL 1.1, SOAP 1.1, WSI-Basic Profile 1.1, and HTTP. And the maximum number of callouts in an Apex transaction cannot exceed 100.

• Given an existing system landscape, analyze for constraints and/or pain-points to satisfy a business requirement(s)..

A system landscape may consist of constraints and/or pain points that can negatively affect integration solutions. For instance, if the custom logic defined in an Apex class that performs a SOAP callout to an ERP system is incorrect, the integration can cause errors in the ERP system.

Salesforce features such as organization-wide defaults, profiles, permission sets, and automated business processes may need to be assessed to identify any constraints or pain points that can be eliminated.

• Given a set of requirements, evaluate the authentication and authorization needs based on the system landscape.

A system landscape represents an IT infrastructure and illustrates how servers, clients, external applications, and other systems relate with each other. System integration requires authentication and authorization to allow and secure communication between independent systems. Salesforce supports different protocols and provides several tools to allow various types of integration with their multi-tenant platform.

This section covers basic concepts related to authorization and authentication for external systems integrated with Salesforce, and describes, namely, the topics such as Named Credentials, OAuth 2.0, Connected Apps, and Certificates & Keys.