Get to Know MuleSoft Composer
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain when to use MuleSoft Composer to integrate systems and data.
- Describe the MuleSoft Composer features.
The Problem with Systems and Data Integration
In today’s fast-paced world, organizations need to make timely business decisions using the most up-to-date data. But in most organizations, data tends to be siloed and locked up in various systems. Until now, integrating different systems and data has been a time-consuming manual process that must be performed frequently to meet business needs.
If you are a system admin, business analyst, marketer, salesperson, or team leader responsible for important business processes, you’ve felt this pain. You’ve had to depend on IT and line-of-business developer teams to integrate systems and data and automate the whole process. This dependency puts an enormous strain on IT organizations and developer teams already stretched thin by growing business demands and shrinking IT resources.
Let’s take a look at some common integration challenges.
- A sales team creates and maintains sales data in Salesforce and stores order data in NetSuite. Every time an opportunity record is updated to Closed Won in Salesforce, they have to create a sales order for the products from that opportunity in NetSuite.
- A marketing team collects information about all attendees of a marketing event in a Google Sheets spreadsheet. They need to use this information to periodically create or update contacts in Salesforce.
- A sales team manages and maintains interactive visualizations that are based on a leads data source in Tableau. Currently, the sales team is performing these tasks manually. Every week, they export leads from Sales Cloud to a .csv file, create a Tableau .hyper extract from the .csv file, and publish the extract as a data source to a Tableau Cloud project.
Each of these scenarios requires you to manually access different systems and manipulate data. In the process, you risk losing valuable data through human error and waste precious time.
A Solution for Systems and Data Integration
Enter MuleSoft Composer, a low-code integration tool designed for anyone, including system admins, business analysts, marketers, salespeople, and team leaders. Composer’s goal is to solve these types of integration problems and relieve the burden on your central IT and line-of-business developer team.
Use MuleSoft Composer to quickly and easily build flows to integrate systems and data and automate integration tasks. The best part is you can do this using just clicks. You never have to write any code!
In this module, you learn about MuleSoft Composer’s integration features, flow components, and flow creation tasks. To learn how to install and configure MuleSoft Composer, take the MuleSoft Composer Installation and Configuration module. To get step-by-step instructions to solve common integration problems using MuleSoft Composer, take the other modules in the MuleSoft Composer Trailmix.
Integrating Faster with MuleSoft Composer
Let’s take a closer look at how MuleSoft Composer accelerates business processes and unlocks siloed data.
Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO), an outdoor clothing retail company, has grown since its founding. Over the years, each team has used their own systems to store data. While this was fine when NTO was a smaller company, as their workforce expands, the company finds it increasingly difficult to have a single source of truth. Employees also spend a lot of time logging into different systems to retrieve and update data instead of working on strategic initiatives.
Some departments have asked if the IT department can help them integrate their systems, but the IT department has their hands full with other projects.
Luckily, the business operations manager recently found a solution to their problems: MuleSoft Composer. After MuleSoft Composer is set up and running, teams can create the flows that they need. They automate data updates, sync different systems, and streamline business processes.
Now, teams that were previously bogged down by menial tasks like updating data in different systems have more time for strategic work. They’re also able to quickly onboard new hires, forecast sales more accurately, resolve support cases faster, and overall have a better view of their customers. NTO is more productive now that their workflows are more efficient.
Features of MuleSoft Composer
MuleSoft Composer makes it easy to perform integration tasks. Any user, no matter their background, can perform the following tasks using flows.
- Extract data based on a specific event or schedule and map the data from one system to another.
- Synchronize data across different systems.
- Filter and route data through a flow based on conditions.
- Loop through a collection of records and perform specific actions on each record.
- Test, run, monitor, manage, and troubleshoot flows.
We designed and built MuleSoft Composer with accessibility in mind and provide contextual in-app help every step of the way.
One of the best things about MuleSoft Composer is that you get a number of ready-to-use connectors. These enable you to integrate with systems including Salesforce, Tableau, Slack, NetSuite, Workday, and Google Sheets. We’re developing and releasing new connectors all the time so that you can connect applications, data, and devices as your business requires.
You just learned about what you can achieve with MuleSoft Composer. In the next unit, you explore MuleSoft Composer flow components and flow creation tasks.