I'm writing a report and thought you guys could help by providing me with the costs of company support in setting up and training a client on a data integrator for Salesforce. E.g., if someone wants to use Salesforce, but first needs a tool to consolidate and transfer data from back office systems to Salesforce how much would that support service cost?
A:
Salesforce actually comes with a very good integration tool called Data Loader. It can be run as an interactive application under Windows or Macintosh, or it can be run as a command-line tool on Windows, Mac or Linux.
In interactive mode, it can import & export CSV files.
In batch mode it can also read data from, and write data to, a database.
For example, I have a Linux server where a daily cron job activates the Data Loader which runs several jobs. Some of these jobs run SQL against a database and upload the resulting data into Salesforce. Other jobs extract from Salesforce (using their SOQL query language, which is SQL-like) and store the information into a database.
Data Loader has a bit of a learning curve for batch mode (mostly around creating some XML configuration files), but the Interactive mode is very easy to use.
So, to answer your question... If it's a one-time data load, just run the interactive version and it's easy. If you want regularly-updated data, then use the batch mode. Support costs for operating the integration are really all in the setup. Once it's running, there shouldn't be any on-going costs unless the data structures change and you want to change the data being transferred. Better yet, if the system is setup by somebody who has done it before, you'll avoid a big learning curve.
If you want a figure to put into your report, then allow 3 days for the initial integration (allows for learning curve) and then a half-day for each additional one. That's generous, but provides extra time to debug problems.
John R
2010-10-21 04:08:01