One of the most crucial features of an enterprise-level Drupal deployment is integration with third-party Web services, especially third-party buisiness analytics tools such as Eloqua and CRMs (customer relations management systems) such as Salesforce. Particularly when e-commerce is involved, clients need to build workflows keyed to specific user interactions - for example, a user logging in, a user adding a product to their cart, a user downloading a file - where data about the user and about their activity is submitted to the third-party service. Moreover, these workflows need to be adaptable to changing business requirements.

The most common approach to such requirements is to leverage Drupal's internal APIs in a custom module. However, this approach limits the ability of the site manager to respond quickly to changing requrements, since custom modules usually require the involvement of a developer to modify them. It also requires a significant outlay of time and labor in development and QA. In general, Drupal Connect developers always look to existing, proven technologies when architecting solutions to even the most complex requirements.

When we built a new site for Camouflage Datamasking Specialists (http://www.datamasking.com), we accomplished the above requirements by leveraging the Rules module, which allowed us to hook into common user events related to log-in, registration, purchase, and file download to submit data to the Eloqua business analytics service. Using Rules, we were able to build complex workflows based on several available profile types the user had filled in, what areas of the site the user had accessed previously, and whether or not they had agreed to the terms of service.

Because we used Rules, site administrators were able to adjust the workflows as their business needs changed simply by creating new conditions and tying them to the desired actions within the Rules administrative interface. The only custom code required for the integration was the implementation of a Rules action for sending gathered data to the Eloqua analytics service as a CURLed form submission (Eloqua has an API, but Camouflage was not set up to be able to use it). Implementing the action was straightforward using Rules' API, minimizing the time and cost of development, QA, and maintenance.