Many SCRMs today are as much platforms as they are systems. This means that you can integrate them with many third-party offerings (from other vendors) in order to expand and enhance their capabilities. Think about it this way: if you wished to use data found in your SCRM in another application, which would be an integration opportunity, or if there are sales, customer support, or marketing functions that are not adequately addressed by your SCRM, there may be an available integration to facilitate this.
This chapter will expose you to some ideas by concentrating on common and popular deployments. However, before we do that, let's take a look at how these unions might actually work:
Throw it over the fence: This is the simplest form of integration where you can gather a group of records and then throw that data (export it) to another program. Typically, the data that you are exporting will be preconfigured to match the data format that is required by the other application...