Client Overview

Client is a US based IT service provider, which is focused on providing cloud-based solutions to the enterprises. Client offers a full suite of cloud strategy and implementation services.

Business Challenge

• The client wanted to improve its existing implementation and be able to share it with the leading social network applications quickly, the client needed a new and enhanced product that could –

  • Access the news feeds from service providers like Yahoo and Google

  • Apply smart filters in context of the current company and contact that is being accessed in CRM

  • Provide users with the capability to publish and share these news items over various social networking channels

• Its previous implementation with Yahoo pipes did not provide a robust integration with the news provider and also lacked the features of sharing with LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Chatter etc.

• To address these limitations and provide a more generic and configurable product to the market, the customer mandated Eternus Solutions to implement a new solution.

Technical Requirements

• Visualforce

• Apex

• XML

• JavaScript

• JQuery

Solution Strategy

• Eternus Solutions team reviewed the functional and technical requirements and worked with the company to implement a new RSS News Feed Reader based on Force.com’s excellent HTTP communication and XML parsing capabilities using Apex and JQuery as the lightweight front end technology.

• Every time an Account or a Contact’s detail page is visited, the RSS News Feed Reader’s application framework queries Google News over HTTP and fetches the response in an RSS XML format. The XML response is parsed using an intelligent XML parser to extract all the relevant information in context of the current Account or Contact.

• Once parsed, the news items are displayed on a visually appealing accordion menu like UI that also provides the user, the capability to share the news article using Email and on various social network channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Salesforce’s very own chatter.

Solution Components

• Creation and customization of standard and custom objects

• Triggers, workflows and classes to manage the business work flow

• XML parsing capabilities using Apex and JQuery

• New custom Visualforce pages, triggers and workflows aligned to various processes

Development Methodology

• Development on developer sandbox

• SRS and design documents to start building any new components

• Designing and developing workflows for various processes

• Extensive usage of trigger, classes, batch apex and schedulers to write custom logic

• Coding using SFDC standards and best practices