DrupalCamp 2018: Connecting a Cornell Instance of Salesforce to a Drupal Site

How does a global institution make it easier for students to discover and take advantage of extracurricular, travel, and research opportunities it offers? The first project under the umbrella of the Cornell Student Experience Initiative, Cornell University's Opportunities Marketplace is Cornell's student-facing solution to a decentralized legacy process of paperwork, phone communication, and manual data entry. Our session jumps into the implementation process to explore how we balanced constraints of accessibility requirements, legacy data platforms, distributed systems of record and data silos, and high profile stakeholders. 

With ambitious goals and an aggressive timeline, IT@Cornell architected and built a centralized repository for discovering and applying to educational and extra-curricular opportunities. By leveraging the strongest traits of each platform, we delivered a multifaceted solution that uses Drupal 8 as the front end, Salesforce as a backend, and other technologies as data feeds for the information displayed to the end users.

We'll discuss how we've used a Drupal 8 stack to:
Complement Drupal's CMS strengths with Salesforce's CRM data processing, management, and reporting tools
Aggregate people and programs from several sources via webservices and custom Drupal modules
Serve consolidated and personalized content natively in Drupal via web and JSON API
Accommodate affiliated and unaffiliated applicants with two side-by-side SAML service providers for single sign-on
Leverage various contrib modules including Salesforce Suite, simpleSAMLphp Authentication, JSON API, Geolocation Field
Build custom modules to implement our business logic utilizing Drupal core and contrib APIs

Attendees should:
Be interested in broad implementation decisions and software selection
Be familiar with concepts of API calls and integrations
Have interest in CRM space, e.g. Salesforce

After attending this session attendees will be able to:
Identify the strengths of existing institutional platforms and datasets to engage constituents and enrich user experience
Make smarter decisions about integrating powerful services with Drupal
Get off the Drupal island: be flexible in finding the best tool for the job