1. Integrating Drupal
& Salesforce.com
with Alfresco DM
Howard Tyson
& Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
Zivtech, LLC

2. Why integrate Drupal,
Alfresco DM, and Salesforce.com?
• Don’t settle, use best of breed applications for each of your needs
• Alfresco is the clear leader in enterprise Document and Records
Management
• Drupal is an unmatched database driven WCM and content
presentation system
• Salesforce.com is dominating the CRM market

3. Common Integration Methods
• Drupal's new CMIS Module
• Drupal Salesforce.com Module
• Custom Web Services / Web Scripts
• Custom Integratation via Custom Drupal modules
See http://www.zivtech.com/alfresco for more info on why
Drupal site owners should consider adopting Alfresco.

4. Integration Issues
• Synchronization
o Configuring each of your systems to communicate with one
another can be costly and can require the duplication of effort on
each side of the integration
• Backup
o Your data may be at the mercy of your SaaS provider
• Availability
o Services can fail without warning, possibly causing data
collisions and data loss
o Salesforce.com meters API calls
o You still need to maintain operations when one or more systems
fails
• Scalability
o It can be difficult or impossible to scale all of your systems to
handle peak traffic

5. Introducing Houston Command Center
The goal of Houston is to create a super-system out of many
disparate systems.
• houstoncommand.com
• Create a single “Application” out of disparate local and
Applications
• Standalone PHP/MySQL application
• Will be released under the GNU-GPL this fall
• Reduce vendor lock in & keep ownership of your data

6. The Houston Solution: Synchronization
• Duplicate data entry is costly and inconsistent
• Houston can synchronize your data on your schedule
• Real time
• Have other systems PUSH their changes into Houston
o Just in time
Poll the other systems at the time the object is loaded
o On a schedule
Perform bulk synchronizations, pulling in new changes
on a fixed schedule with reports on the results via
Hudson

7. The Houston Solution: Features
• Synchronize your data between systems
• Backup all important data, including objects & their
relationships
• Allow your systems to tolerate the failure of cloud
services
• Advanced Job Queue provides fault tolerance and can
reduce the peak load on other systems

8. The Houston Solution: Availability
• Houston keeps a cache of all of of the data that passes
through and serves that if a remote service goes down
• Houston replicates data into remote systems (to the
degree each system is able) reducing or removing the
requirement that they are reachable for realtime load
• Houston queues failures, locks those objects to prevent
them from being overwritten and can be configured to
queue all traffic to a remote server

9. The Houston Solution: Scalability
• Houston acts as the control center for all your systems.
• If a system goes down Houston maintains the data and
synchronizes it later.
• Houston queues documents and pushes them through
to your document repository at a pace that won't crash
the system.
• Houston ensures that all data is received.
• To scale the entire infrastructure of a company you
need only scale the hardware that controls Houston.

10. The Houston Solution: Backup
• Not original goal of application: a by-product of solving other
issues
• Houston maintains all the document records, version
information and update history
• The most recent copy of each of your files
• Back up Houston and you've backed up all your systems.

11. The Houston Solution: Files
• Will likely require an Alfresco Enterprise Subscription
• Currently integrated via custom web-scripts
• Also possible to integrate via PHP stream wrappers
(Drupal 7 only - experimental)

12. The Houston Solution: Future Features
• More advanced Hudson support for queue
monitoring and management
• More configurable record locking make it easier to
set data system precedence
• CMIS support to replace custom Alfresco
webscripts

13. Contact Us
If you have any questions:
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg alex@zivtech.com
Howard Tyson howard@zivtech.com
Heather Fowle heather.fowle@alfresco.com
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