For the Force.com developer hackathon, I developed an integration toolkit between 37Signals‘ Basecamp application for project management and Salesforce.com. This little bit of work earned me the top prize in the Dreamforce 2009 Hackathon so a big thanks to Salesforce.com for putting on the event. It has easily become my favorite part of the Dreamforce conference.

Salesforce.com, in its simplest form, allows for the tracking of business leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities and its development platform extends its functionality to include pretty much whatever a developer can come up with. For many organizations, these salesforce opportunities represent products that are being purchased by another company. What if, however, you are a professional services group? Your services are products in a sense, however the native salesforce.com functionality of products is fairly limited for use for professional services.

Enter Basecamp
Basecamp allows you to manage companies, projects and the various messages, to-do lists, milestones, files and time tracking for each project.

Your Basecamp is in my Salesforce
This Basecamp+Salesforce.com toolkit allows you to tie Salesforce opportunities to Basecamp projects right out of the box. The toolkit includes methods for all of the Basecamp API methods so developers can build their own applications using whichever Salesforce.com objects and business logic they desire using visualforce and apex code.

Due to the time constraints on the Hackathon competition, the toolkit requires a little bit of work on my part before I deem it ready for releasing to the Force.com Code Share.

Features

• Tie your Salesforce user account to your Basecamp user account
• Associate opportunities to existing Basecamp projects
• Create new Basecamp projects from within Salesforce
• Create, read, edit and delete project messages, to-do lists and milestones
• Manage completion of to-do lists

Considerations
Both Basecamp and Salesforce have methods for alerting users regarding upcoming tasks. The initial version of this integration relies on Basecamp’s notifications, which can be selected from within Salesforce.

Roadmap
Due to the short timeframe provided during the Dreamforce Hackathon there are a few Basecamp functional areas that were not written into the toolkit. I plan to add these items soon but they may not be in the first version released to the code share.

• Time tracking
• Writeboards
• Files

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with either Salesforce.com, Dreamforce, 37Signals or Basecamp.

I’m heading out to San Francisco this week for Dreamforce 2009, this year’s Salesforce.com User & Developer conference.

Some of the things I’m particularly looking forward to:

• Dreamforce Tweetup
• Developer certification exams to become a certified Force.com Developer
• Force.com Hackathon: David Schach and I are teaming up on Wednesday night to develop a “killer Force.com integration” with <insert web app name here>.
• Meeting up with many of the folks I met last year at the non-profit dinner event
• Meeting new developers and users
• Finding new projects and ideas to work on when I return to Reno.

I’ll be posting some content later this week, especially with a cool app integration to show off from the Hackathon.

I’ve been working with Salesforce.com for just over a year and it is no where near the same system it was when I started working at Twelve Horses. In the past year, I have seen the CRM evolve to include a full developer platform, Force.com, with Apex code allowing developers to create complex business logic for data manipulation, maintaining data quality and the ability to communicate with external services [see Google Data API/Toolkit below]. Force.com then grew to include Visualforce, which grants users the ability to create custom interfaces that use Salesforce.com metadata. Combining Salesforce objects, Apex code and Visualforce, developers are now able to develop in the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern. Simply, MVC allows for the developer to separate their code into layers for ease of maintenance and further development.

I just got back from Tour de Force, which featured a few exciting announcements, especially the Google Data API Toolkit, which allows developers to create, manipulate and pull data from Google applications like YouTube, Calendar, Spreadsheets, Docs and more.

I’ve been developing a project management application through Twelve Horses. Dreamforce 2008 is fast approaching and I would love to be able to package the application and make it available via the AppExchange before then.