Salesforce, the world’s #1 CRM, provides a framework to connect your users and external services. The Connected App is one of the most amazing features in Salesforce that require integration with Salesforce to verify users and control security policies for external apps.
What is the Connected App?
A connected app is a framework that integrates external applications into Salesforce using standard APIs and protocols such as SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect. Connected apps use these protocols to authenticate, authorize, and provide single sign-on (SSO) for the external applications. Salesforce’s built-in external application can run on the customer success platform, other platforms, devices, or SaaS subscriptions.
For instance, when you log in to your Salesforce mobile app and see your data from your Salesforce org, you’re using a connected app.
Connected App Use Cases
Before you create a connected app and manage its access policies, you need to know how your org is going to use the connected app.
There are few use cases for which your org can use connected apps.
Using connected application, you can integrate external applications with the Salesforce API, such as a web-based application that pulls in order status data from your Salesforce org.
You can also use a connected application to activate a single-sign-on system (SSO) or set security policies to control what data can be accessed by third-party applications from your org. Finally, you can configure connected applications to give permission for external API gateways, such as API gateways hosted on MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform.
Examples of Connected Apps
- Ant Migration Tool
- Chatter Desktop
- Dataloader
- Forcec.com IDE
- Salesforce for Outlook
- Workbench
Benefits of Connecting your app to Salesforce
Agility and ease of use
Connecting your app to Salesforce allows you to take advantage of Salesforce’s biggest feature: click instead of code. Basically, Salesforce’s easy-to-use interface allows you to make changes that are directly reflected in your web or mobile environment.
A complete view of your customer
This gives you the ability to make accurate forecasts, enrich your marketing campaigns, and give you a holistic view of your customers in a single place.
Scalability
With a connected app, Salesforce becomes a unified place to run your entire business that can also control and manipulate your web and mobile app with a simple and intuitive User Interface. A place where you can change the description of one of your products without touching code, sending push notifications, and changing prices.
Conclusion
A connected app is simply a web and/or mobile app that is built off of the Salesforce platform. These are apps built using coding languages like Ruby on Rails, Python, Go, Swift, etc.
The reason it’s called a connected app is that we can connect these apps back to your Salesforce org using Heroku Connect. By being connected to Salesforce you can control what happens in your app from your Salesforce Org.
If you’re looking to get a more in-depth explanation of how Salesforce connected apps work, the benefits they provide, contact our certified Salesforce lightning experts now and they will assist you to unlock the power of Salesforce with connected apps.
