ClickLink Lightning edition drives point & click integration on Salesforce1 to new levels
As the self appointed world’s #1 fan of the Certinia ClickLink™ tool I was very excited to get my hands on the latest and greatest version (known internally as ClickLink Lightning edition). For new readers, ClinkLink is the tool Certinia administrators, partners and implementers use to configure object-to-object transformation and field mapping on the Salesforce1 platform. This wonderfully powerful tool, available only to Certinia.com customers and partners, provides a simple, easy to maintain, point-and-click way for organizations to define the flow of data from Salesforce platform objects to and from valid transactions within Certinia applications. So whether its generation of customer invoices from opportunities, billing time on support cases, turning expense report data into employee reimbursements or any of the hundreds of other use cases we see ClickLink used for, what was previously a costly and time consuming code cutting exercise turns into a simple configuration step.
Having now played with this new release I’m simply blown away by the new capabilities that this already great tool will provide our customers. Here’s a quick run through of the highlights:
Support for Quick Actions: ClickLink now adds the ability to run rules from Quick Actions defined on the source object and therefore you can now kick off rules from within your chatter feed or directly from your smartphone or tablet device. Need to bill a customer but only have access to your smartphone? No problem as Quick Actions are available on any mobile device that supports the Salesforce1 mobile app. Even if mobile access to your ERP apps isn’t important to you, Quick Actions provide a highly intuitive, quickly adopted way of performing common day-to-day business operations directly from your Chatter social feed.
Support for Process Builder: ClickLink rules can now be called directly from the recently announced Salesforce Process Builder tool. This means that rather than writing Apex triggers you can now quickly define the criteria for rules to be automatically fired when source records are created or updated. For example, once an order reaches a particular stage or status, the billing of that order can automatically fire. Process Builder is going to be a hugely powerful tool for all users of the Salesforce1 platform and ClickLink support is a great example of how Certinia takes a great platform feature and makes it even better for our customers.
Support for External Objects: A great new Salesforce1 feature is Lightning Connect which provides an easily configured method for reaching out to data which resides off the platform. Once the external object definition is set up, the off platform data can then be queried and displayed as if that data existed in regular salesforce objects in your org. This is a game changer. With ClickLink now supporting these external objects Certinia customers will be able to quickly configure sophisticated mapping between legacy databases, web services and their Certinia ERP applications.
NB: Only right that I point out that while there are no additional Certinia license fees associated with ClickLink, the Lightning Connect capability is licensed separately by Salesforce so there will be additional costs to use this feature.
Simply put, this is a groundbreaking release from which I’m sure our customers will quickly derive huge benefits . Hats off to the development team – ClickLink just gets better and better and is a shining example of the “Clicks Not Code” ethos we see throughout the entire range of Certinia apps.
