Lightning Connect is one of the features that allows us to seamlessly integrate an external system with Salesforce in real time. We can import external data tables as external objects into Salesforce. For example, data stored on the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can be connected as an external object via web service callouts.
The data is connected in real-time, so there is no scope for data being stale and out of sync. We can use external objects when:
We want to connect Salesforce to a system with large amounts of data on an external system
We want real-time access to the latest data
The following diagram illustrates the Lightning Connect process:
Let's start by connecting to a sample external web service. For this example, we are going to connect to a sample web service found at http://Odata.org.
We are going to connect to the web-service at http://services.odata.org/V2/(S(l4iqzxoq5ftoav2fe5qcumtx))/OData/OData.svc/.
Go to Setup...