Advise company on building enterprise app using Salesforce REST APIs

Summary

Our team advised the Customer's Engineering team on Salesforce REST API best practices to support their initiative to migrate from an Experience Cloud Site to a custom web application that used Salesforce data as the source of truth.

Need

The Customer had a company-wide initiative to consolidate their users' multiple logins via one portal. The Customer's users could see the applications and services they had access to from within the portal.

One application they wanted all their customers to have access to was known as the "Support Portal."

The Customer's Support Portal was an Experience Cloud Site. However, the Customer wanted to migrate off the Experience Cloud Site and onto a custom web application.

To achieve this, the Customer's Salesforce team would hand off the ownership and maintenance of the custom web application to another Engineering team in the Customer's organization. The custom application would need to hit Salesforce's APIs, as Salesforce was the source of truth for customer data. However, the Engineering team needed to learn more about Salesforce, and the Customer's Salesforce team was working on other projects. 

That's where they tapped the expertise of our team.

Solution

Our team did the following:

• Document the personas and how they use the existing Experience Cloud Site in its before state
• Analyze the Apex classes, SOQL queries, REST API calls, and Aura components that comprised the custom components in the Experience Cloud Site
• Provide REST API endpoints and SOQL queries that would minimize the risk of the custom web application from hitting the rolling 24-hour Salesforce REST API limits.
• Advise Customer's Engineering team on authenticating to Salesforce via JWT Bearer token flow
• Since the Aura components in the Experience Cloud Site did not respect the User's sharing access, we had to create custom Apex share logic to grant access to the records, making them visible when the custom application queries for them via Salesforce REST APIs.
• Write REST API wrappers to invoke external web services instrumental to onboarding, provisioning, and de-provisioning support contacts.
• Perform extensive user acceptance testing with members of the Customer's Product, Engineering teams, as well as beta customers 
  

Result

After a year and a half of work, the Customer launched their web application to 70,000 users on time and regularly updated the product with new capabilities.