Get Started with Anypoint Platform

Learning Objectives

In this project, you’ll:

Connect your instance of Anypoint Platform to Trailhead.
Create two new orgs.
Deploy your integration in Anypoint Platform.
Test your integration in Salesforce.

Introduction

Do you know how many applications the average business uses today? If you said more than 1,000, you’d be correct. And the number is growing. Wouldn’t it be nice to automatically connect all the data from these applications?

When integrating data from various sources, your best answer is MuleSoft. With MuleSoft, your organization can boost productivity and reduce costs by automating workflows and connecting apps and data. Let’s look at one of MuleSoft’s featured products—Anypoint Platform.

What does Anypoint Platform offer?

A single platform: Anypoint Platform simplifies the integration process. It provides a single platform for developing, managing, and hosting apps used for integrating applications, data, and devices.
Reusable assets: Anypoint Platform’s library of reusable assets helps businesses speed up the integration process and reduce costs.
A global community: Businesses have access to expertise and support with MuleSoft’s large and active community of users and partners.

To learn more about how MuleSoft simplifies the design and management of your APIs and integrations, see API Lifecycle Management with Anypoint Platform.

How to Use Anypoint Platform

Your organization will experience the true power of the platform when you build a Mule app as an interface for each application, data source, and device in your organization. When you do this, you end up with an application network. This network allows other consumers from other parts of the business to come in and discover and reuse those assets. Application networks are MuleSoft’s success story.

The opposite of this approach is to build one-off point-to-point integrations. Because this approach requires custom coding each connection, it’s most beneficial when you have a small number of connections. When your number of connections is large, point-to-point integrations are time-consuming and make it near impossible to troubleshoot problems.

Integration Challenge

Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO) has acquired the shoe company Cloud Kicks. The leaders of the two companies don’t want their customers to feel neglected as the merger takes place. They task NTO’s integration team, led by Linda Rosenberg, with creating an integration between the companies’ two different Salesforce orgs using Anypoint Platform. Linda already loves all things Salesforce automation and is eager to get hands-on with MuleSoft.

Integration Solution

To solve this common integration challenge, Linda is going to use Anypoint Platform to write a Mule application to connect the Case object in two Salesforce orgs. That way, when a support agent enters a case record in the first org, it automatically appears in the second org.

In an ideal world, Linda would create a separate Mule app for each org. But following the recommended practice would make the solution a little complex. Because she’s just being introduced to Anypoint Platform, she’ll use a simple solution. Linda is ready to set up her Anypoint Platform account.

Set Up Your Anypoint Platform Account

First, sign up for a free 30-day Anypoint Platform account, so you can start working with Anypoint Platform.

Go to https://anypoint.mulesoft.com/login/signup.
Fill out the form. For Email, enter an active email address.
After you fill out the form, click Accept and create account.
A Verify Email message will appear. Click Verify Email.
Enter the verification code from your email account. Click Confirm.

Now connect your new Anypoint Platform account to Trailhead.

Make sure you’re logged in to your Trailhead account.
In the Challenge section at the bottom of this page, click Connect Anypoint Account.
On the Authorize App screen, click Grant Access to Account.

Click Verify Step to go to the next step in the project, where you create new orgs for your integration.