Integrating Micro Focus Content Manager with Salesforce simply makes sense. Intelligent connecting best-of-breed systems is now widely preferred over creating bespoke "do it all" products.

Micro Focus Content Manager (aka TRIM) is a highly scalable record management system that helps businesses and agencies meet regulatory compliance requirements and organizational mandates. Critical documents are securely managed according to policy from creation through to disposal (cradle to grave). This includes control over record creation, access, fragmentation, versioning, contextual data, change control, retrieval, misuse, and destruction.

Salesforce is a powerful cloud-based enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) system. CRMs store prospect and customer information while providing an interface for support case and task management, and utilities to automatically route and escalate important events.

Salesforce

The Salesforce platform is easily customized to meet individual business requirements and a multitude of extensions are available from the AppExchange. Salesforce also provides Government Cloud, hosted out of Australia, to more closely accommodate the needs of government departments.

Salesforce already has strong document handling capabilities with Files, Content, Salesforce Knowledge, Documents, and Attachments. However, volume storage can get expensive, and these capabilities are not designed for the level of document management required by many organizations. It makes sense, therefore, to provide a way to transact documents between Salesforce and Micro Focus Content Manager. In fact, the benefits are many, including contextual processing, ease of access, increased security, and cost savings.

Good document handling is about having documents available to you immediately, with all permissions respected, in the correct context, and in the application, you are using. For Salesforce users, separately logging into Micro Focus Content Manager should be cast into history in much the same way as physical document filing itself.

Disconnected Workspaces

Consider the following! As part of your daily work, you log in to Salesforce and begin working with a contact record. You expect the record data to be complete, relevant, accurate, timely, and accessible (CRATA). In the contact record, you would expect to see all you need to know about your customer. But “all you need” includes any documents associated with the contact. This may come in the form of regular Salesforce attachments or important documents in Micro Focus Content Manager. Making operators exit Salesforce to retrieve the records introduces risk and inefficiencies. Operators would be required to:

• Know both Salesforce and Micro Focus Content Manager
• Go to Micro Focus Content Manager and lose their Salesforce focus and context
• Search Micro Focus Content Manager for a record that may not exist (or retrieve a document for the wrong “John Smith”)

T4S Integration

Seamlessly and securely accessing documents on-demand, from multiple devices, and within the Salesforce context, has many benefits. Since Salesforce is where customer data is kept, it makes sense that Salesforce is the master system i.e. by looking at a Salesforce record, the user will see all the documents (permissions withstanding) associated with this record.

FuseIT’s T4S makes Micro Focus Content Manager documents securely available in Salesforce leads or contact records (or any other Salesforce object). From inside Salesforce, a user can select a Content Manager file, and if the user has the correct privileges, T4S will retrieve the document and seamlessly display it in Salesforce. This achieves transparent and contextual record availability without needing to deal with, or even being aware of Micro Focus Content Manager.

Let’s consider ease of use! Gartner says employees “use an average of three different devices in their daily routine, which will increase to five or six devices as more technologies become mainstream”. By design, Salesforce processes information in real time from multiple devices. With T4S, this availability is extended to Content Manager documents without compromising security. In fact, security is reinforced by imposing the additional layer of Salesforce authentication.

Integration improves data quality! T4S can be configured so documents only exist in Content Manager. Agents use links in Salesforce records to access Micro Focus Content Manager records on demand. Having a single source of truth reduces the likelihood of duplicate records and confusion. On a technical level, having a single document source removes the complexity of data synchronization, polling, and ETL processes.

T4S can move documents in both directions and can map selected Salesforce objects (contacts, accounts, cases, etc.) to target locations in Micro Focus Content Manager. Transacting large volumes of data with Salesforce is achieved by using a T4S software engine on a network server, typically adjacent to Micro Focus Content Manager, that moves documents between the systems based on requests from Salesforce.

Having an intermediary server opens up a world of other opportunities like using T4S to create a snapshot of Salesforce data so enterprises can continue their business largely uninterrupted during Salesforce outages - but that is another story.