Looking to wring more synergies out of its recent acquisitions, Salesforce.com Inc. today used its TrailblazerDX 2022 developer conference to introduce new integrations between its core customer relationship management system and the Slack collaboration and Tableau data visualization platforms.

Salesforce.com’s MuleSoft subsidiary also expanded its feature for managing application program interfaces.

Integration with Slack, which claims more than 10 million daily users, lets Salesforce.com developers build custom applications directly into Slack. That includes creating Slack channels and sending account status updates to teams as well as building guided automation routines with Salesforce.com developer tools that can be used within Slack.

Developers working in Salesforce.com’s Apex object-oriented programming language now have a software development kit for Slack that allows them to write in Apex code and automatically generate calls to Slack’s Block Kit user interface framework. Developers can fetch Salesforce.com records, create reusable views and route events between the two platforms without the need for middleware, the company said.

“Integration with Salesforce and Slack brings a single view of the customer to everyone in the company,” said Tamar Yehoshua, Slack’s chief product officer. “It also enables 11 million Salesforce developers to use their existing tools to create apps in Slack.”

Salesforce is also announcing the beta availability of multiple applications for Slack in its marketplace as well as enhancing its Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud with Slack integration.

Tableau simplifies connector integration

New Tableau capabilities give developers a new version of Web Connector that provides a single toolkit for building connectors to other web application data. Embedding API v3 provides an easier way to embed and integrate Tableau analytics into other applications using web components. Tableau says it has more than 100 different connectors.

Embeddable Web Authoring allows Tableau’s authoring toolset to be embedded into any application, enabling data visualizations to be edited from within another application or web portal. Connected Apps for Seamless Authentication is a new authentication framework that provides the means for developers to add single-sign-on protection to applications that integrate Tableau data. Finally, Tableau Actions with Salesforce Flow allows anyone to trigger workflows in Salesforce Flow directly from a Tableau dashboard.

MuleSoft is using the conference to announce Anypoint Code Builder, an integrated development environment for creating application program interfaces and integrations with an interface “built from the ground up using modern Visual Studio Code,” a popular open-source code editor, said Shaun Clowes, MuleSoft’s chief product officer. The IDE helps developers get started faster with built-in recommendations at design time and it includes a library of building blocks for common API and integration patterns.

MuleSoft also said it now provides universal API management capabilities to manage APIs anywhere from a single place. The approach uses the Anypoint Flex Gateway for security and performance and Anypoint API Governance to ensure that policies and industry regulations are complied with. “Organizations producing APIs faster than they can manage them, especially when they are across different gateways and management platforms,” Clowes said.

For its part, Salesforce.com announced enhancements to Flow, its workflow automation suite, that integrates its low-code tools with Slack. New Flow Actions also enable workflows to be launched from a Tableau dashboard, eliminating the need to switch applications. Finally, Flow is also getting new features to integrate with data from other sources and incorporate robotic process automation technology from MuleSoft.

Photo: Salesforce.com