Tag Archives: React

App Development with Salesforce Technologies

Working together with our partners to bring ideas to life is one of the driving forces behind everything we do here at Oktana. That’s why when Huge approached us to help them with app development for Stanley Security; we leaped at the chance.

Stanley is a large security company specializing in commercial security systems. They needed a tool for their field sales team to use on the go that showcased their current product offerings. Also, they preferred to manage the process through the app, on either computers or tablets.

Huge has excellent skills in front-end development and was planning to develop the app and the UI/UX elements internally. But they needed a partner to help complete the backend work and sync everything up with Stanley’s Salesforce instance. That’s where the team at Oktana came in. Huge was able to focus on designing a front-end experience that would satisfy Stanley’s sales team. Meanwhile, Oktana could focus on a seamless experience on the back end.

How do the front and the back of this application work, and what did it take to make them play nicely? The front-end app was built utilizing React and Node.JS, managed with a Postgres database that Huge hosted on Heroku. For our backend development, we needed to make sure everything tied into the Postgres database correctly. To do that we utilized Heroku Connect to transfer between the front-end database and Salesforce. Additionally, we mapped all the data so that everything was stored where it needed to be on both ends of the application process. This application’s design was for interfacing with Stanley’s Salesforce organization, and it required a Salesforce login to access the app and all of its features. The login ensured that anyone using that app is a part of the sales team at Stanley. 

Now, beyond the basic connective functionality, we needed to complete all aspects of the sales cycle through this app. This included allowing the sales team to send emails for clients with sales details and other information. To make that happen, we built an email tool using Apex and Visualforce. Stanley also wanted to close sales within the app, so we built in Adobe Sign functionality. Sales contracts could be signed digitally, and Zuora payment systems facilitated immediate payment. The final step was to synch the new data with the Salesforce organization.

The key technologies used in this project include:

  • Salesforce
  • Heroku
  • Postgres
  • React
  • Node.JS
  • Heroku Connect
  • Apex
  • Visualforce
  • Adobe Sign
  • Zuora

This project allowed us to work collaboratively with another development team to build different parts of an app. We’ve been able to successfully demonstrate our skill and ability to understand other’s work and apply it to our goals.

We’re looking forward to working with both Huge and Stanley again in the future. If you have a project that we can help you with, please be sure to let us know!

Learn more from our team here, or check out our custom development services.

Gathering Leads with Royal Caribbean

At Oktana, we’re heavily invested in the world of mobile app development. We believe that building new mobile tools that let our customers interact with their Salesforce instance out in the field is essential to the future of the platform. One of the most recent projects that allowed us to utilize our Mobile development skills is our project with Royal Caribbean for their Celebrity Cruises premium brand.

Celebrity Cruises participates in a number of large conferences and expos every year where their sales team is out in the field talking to potential clients and customers. They needed a way to easily gather data from the people they met for giveaways and potential sales leads. Additionally, this needed to be a tool that would allow them to gather the data while offline and then sync with Salesforce when they reconnected later because while moving around at conferences they can’t count on network connectivity.

Oktana was brought in to build an iPad app that would accomplish these goals. The app was built and designed internally by us. We designed an app that was slick and would be impressive looking so that when potential customers saw it on the floor it would look like something you would expect from a premium brand like Celebrity Cruises. We needed to make sure it met all of the client’s needs from beginning to end which included both the technical aspects and the app’s appearance.

What tools did we use to accomplish this task? We built the app using Salesforce DX along with Forcereact and the Salesforce Mobile SDK. The app also talks directly to the Salesforce Sales and Marketing Clouds. When a member of the sales team at Celebrity Cruises is preparing to go out to the floor of a show or conference they simply need to launch the app and select the Salesforce campaign the leads will be entered into. Then when they disconnect from the network the app will store all their leads locally and when they reconnect to the network at the end of the day it will sync them with the proper campaign. Additionally, when leads are entered the team member has the option to edit them for errors or even delete them before they sync to keep their campaign list clean.

This project was a perfect fit for us because it allowed us to utilize our experience in mobile development and Salesforce to make a unique tool for our client. The key elements to highlight for this project include:

  • Salesforce DX
  • React Native
  • Salesforce Mobile SDK
  • Apex
  • Sales Cloud
  • Marketing Cloud
  • iOS
  • UI/UX Design

While we have been working on this project for Celebrity Cruises we have also been helping Royal Caribbean with ensuring their tools meet GDPR requirements in the EU. We created tools to ensure collected data could be anonymized upon request. Royal Caribbean has been a great partner for us at Oktana and we believe this app was a great showcase of our skills in both Salesforce and Mobile development.

If you are a Salesforce partner looking to partner with experts to help you provide the best custom app development solutions to your clients Contact us. Our team will give you more information about these services.