From idea to production in less than a week

The idea

Last Monday afternoon, I discussed with a manager of our People & Culture (HR) team who recently rolled out our new Axway University portal and our manager of Customer Success Organization (CSO) who focuses especially on the technical enablement for Axway partners.

They wanted to explore the ability to measure “partner enablement” from various portals (university.axway.com, community.axway.com, and partners.axway.com). The most important to start with is Axway University.

This would be useful for strategic partner programs, as we have to ensure our partner teams follow the agreed training programs.

We should be able to detect if they don’t and provide them more engaging materials. We reiterated on this idea together, and we found that counting the number of course self-enrollment and course completions would provide a great indicator of partner enablement.

It was obvious for all to keep this information in Salesforce, our CRM, where all other customer and partner information are kept.

The challenge

Technically, the need is to retrieve events from a cloud app, our LMS, and create the corresponding object in another cloud app, our CRM. And, at Axway, we have a solution for that: it’s called “AMPLIFY™ Application Integration,” with the “Integration Builder” product. I started to learn this product earlier this year, and I could assess a very small workload (a couple of hours) to build this integration flow.

But building it is not the only challenge. To make it available with real-life data, it has to be in production. And it would be a great example of Axway solution usage to build and deploy an integration in a couple of days, instead of the usual monthly cycle that exists with other products.

I cannot do this on my own as I’m not part of Axway’s Information System (IS) team, and of course, I don’t have production admin access to deploy such an integration.

However, I know the team, as I was previously involved in a Proof-of-Concept with them to test AMPLIFY Application Integration on some other integration needs. As this was successful, I know they want to start to use it in production.

On Tuesday morning, I reached out to the IS team to see, if it would be possible to deliver this integration on a limited scope in production in the next two days, or if it is a crazy idea to innovate so quickly? I had to try!

I think they loved the idea of fast innovation and also being able to delegate app integration to business teams. We got approval from the IS director on Tuesday afternoon to go to production with the defined scope with the help of our IS DevOps teams.

The delivery

I started to build this very basic but effective flow with Integration Builder on our Griffin Lab environment:

The flow: Receives events from Axway University platform; filters only the concerning learner course self-enrollment and completion; gets course details including the name gets user info including the email, branch, and company; filters the user to process only specific partners; search the corresponding contact in Salesforce using the email; prepare a Salesforce event with just the required info; push the event to Salesforce.

That was completed and fully tested on the IS demo environment on Wednesday.

Thursday after the business review with P&C and CSO teams, and then a final review with the IS team, we were ready to go to production!

I’m not sure how they did, but we found a time-slot Thursday afternoon when all actors of Axway IS were available to push this flow to production.

During a one-hour meeting on Teams, we reviewed step by step all configuration and enabled the flow! And voilà: it’s there in production since yesterday.

And today, it’s Friday and I watch this Salesforce report growing:

And now I can take the time to share this great team collaboration story today.