Exact Online Plugins for the Salesforce Platform

Exact is a global supplier of business software. Their online business solution, called Exact Online provides its users with a toolkit for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), HR, logistics and manufacturing with a particular focus on small- and medium sized businesses. Salesforce is a popular CRM system that is used by companies worldwide. Exact’s recent focus with Exact Online is on creating an ecosystem of (partner) companies around Exact Online by opening up data via an Application Programming Interface (API), offering a set of mobile apps, and by offering the possibility to integrate data from Exact Online into other business applications. For this Bachelor project, a project group consisting of two students created a plugin framework and a set of plugins that enable Exact to facilitate and develop plugins for Exact Online. The possibility to embed plugins with data from Exact Online within other business applications, will be a possible advantage for customers to choose for Exact Online above other business administration software. In particular, Exact wanted to have a set of plugins for CRM-system Salesforce. The project team, proposed to make the assignment more abstract by using a more generic approach. An advantage of such an approach is that a platform independent set of plugins can be offered. Consequently, it will be possible to embed plugins within multiple different business applications. The main challenge in this project was to maintain the features that an integration within a specific platform will offer, yet keeping a generic approach in order to realize a high degree of adaptability, extendability, maintainability and to allow a secure environment for data exchange. With the final prototype that the project team delivered at the end of this project, those goals have been achieved. The final prototype of the Exact Online Plugin framework can be embedded in two different ways in another application. Firstly, it is possible to use a plugin as a ‘stand-alone‘ version. A plugin can be embedded within another application, and show all data related to accounts in Exact Online. Secondly, it is possible to embed a plugin into another application while sending along data that belongs to the other application. These data can be for example company names or phone numbers. The plugin framework will then attempt to match the provided account data with accounts from Exact Online, and show a customized view adapted on and integrated with the ‘host‘ application. Matching is an essential part of the integration of external accounts with accounts from Exact Online. Algorithms that can be used to achieve this matching make use of the distance property of a set of words. In the implementation of the Exact Online Plugin framework this means that organization names are compared to see the degree of similarity between them. Moreover, the algorithms of Levenshtein, an algorithm of Jaro-Winkler and a combination of both are used in specific. The matching module is a feature that have been thoroughly tested, because of the use of a test-driven approach for development. This approach, helped to optimize the level of acceptance for the matching algorithms. Next to unit and user test, a detailed assessment has been made on the security of the application. The creation of a threat model helped to identify potential threats from a security point of view. Based on the findings, application improvements could be made. Concluding, the Exact Online Plugin Framework provides a flexible and maintenance-extensive way to create plugins for Exact Online. By maintaining a generic approach, it is possible to embed plugins within multiple different third-party applications, yet showing application-specific data because of a matching module that is built in.

Subject

exact
online
plugins
matching
levenshtein
jaro-winkler

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Student theses

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bachelor thesis

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