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Prajakta Rane 18Prajakta Rane 18 

Integration with Salesforce

I have an external website storing some data and I need to move data in Salesforce. Its a one way sync i.e from external website to salesforce. 
People in our organization completes certifications and certification details are stored in external website. Our users would like to see that data on contacts page. 
What is the best design approach?
Should i show the data on run time when they access contact page
or should we do sync and store the data in Salesforce? Management would like to create reports on this set of data like how many people completed their certification...
Kindly provide guidance
pconpcon
If you need to run reports on it then you will need to put the data into Salesforce.  You can have external data if you are using Wave Analytics Cloud [1] but it's not cheap.  Your best design option would be to setup an ESB and have that push data from your external site to Salesforce and then have Salesforce push updates to your ESB (if your users will be making changes to your data).  If the data is read only then you just need to push it in.  If you don't want to setup an ESB you can make the REST / SOAP calls to insert the data directly.

If you don't have to report on the data inside of Salesforce then you can just write a Visualforce page that queries your external site, pulls down the data and displays it on your contact page.

Another option would be Lightning Connect [2], but it too is expensive and does not currently support reporting.

[1] http://www.salesforce.com/analytics-cloud/overview/
[2] https://help.salesforce.com/apex/HTViewHelpDoc?id=platform_connect_about.htm