Technology & Tools

Salesforce Files Connect Provides Link to SharePoint Online and OneDrive

The new cloud connector bridges the gap between Salesforce.com and popular file stores.

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 02/05/2015

Salesforce.com Inc. is now offering a connector that aims to bridge its cloud-based CRM portfolio of services with enterprise file repositories. The new Salesforce Files Connect lets organizations centralize their customer relationship management content with file stores including SharePoint and OneDrive with a connector to Google Drive coming in a few months.

The company had promised the release of the connector to SharePoint and OneDrive when it announced a partnership last year.

Salesforce.com claims it's the first to create a repository that natively integrates CRM content and files among popular enterprise file stores.

Salesforce.com said it provides a simple method of browsing, searching and sharing files located in various repositories. The company described two basic use cases. One would enable a sales rep to attach a presentation on OneDrive for Business to a sales lead in the Salesforce CRM app. The other would allow a service representative to pull FAQ content from OneDrive for Business running in the Salesforce Service Cloud app.

The connector supports federated search to query repositories simultaneously from any device and lets users attach files to social feeds, groups or records, enabling them to find contextually relevant information in discussions running in Salesforce Chatter. The tool is also designed to enforce existing file permissions.

For customers and third-party software providers wanting to embed file sharing into their applications, Salesforce.com also is offering the Salesforce Files Connect API.

Vectra Security Platform Detects Insider Threats in Real Time
Vectra Inc., a supplier of a threat detection platform designed to respond to cyber-attacks in real time, is now offering the ability to detect insider and target attacks. The upgraded Vectra X-series platform uses the company's "Community Threat Analysis," which gathers and analyzes reports and activities to determine insider activities that might indicate a compromise.

The software identifies anomalies in behavior and prioritizes how to respond to incidents to protect an organization's most critical assets, according to the company. It does so by detecting both the behavior of cyber-attacks and malware and then is designed to alert administrators the proximity and potential impact to a specific host. The platform is designed to analyze attacks regardless of how they gain access to an app, OS or device.

AppDynamics APM Suite Adds IT Business Impact Analysis
The latest release of the AppDynamics namesake application performance management platform now includes a new component that helps assess the business impact of IT system events and outages.

AppDynamics Application Analytics gathers system and application performance measurements from all aspects of user sessions and transactions across distributed environments in order to help measure how IT may be impacting business performance, explained Maneesh Joshi, the company's senior director and head of product marketing and strategy. It's designed to help IT managers respond to system issues based on a slowdown in business transactions, for example, he explained.

"With any data we capture, we know what the business context is," Joshi said. "It could tell whether there's a server capacity issue, why a database isn't scaling or if it's a disk IO issue. We give all that information in context of business. And that information becomes very powerful because the business guys know what is happening, the IT guys look at the same information in context of the business, so we are speaking the same language and we have the same sense of urgency that would be lacking if you just looked at a server and CPU consumption or memory heap size in isolation on the business context."

The Application Analytics module correlates data in transactions and logs with business operations, enabling IT management to determine the revenue implications of those transactions to focus system resources accordingly.

AppDymanics application performance management platform is available both on-premises or as a cloud-based service. Joshi said both implementations function identically.