CSE498, Collaborative Design, Spring 2020
Computer Science and Engineering
Michigan State University

Place Technology is a Salesforce Independent Software Vendor partner based in Austin, Texas. Salesforce is a cloud-based software company that provides companies with customer relationship management (CRM) services and solutions.

Place Technology has developed a Salesforce product, PlaceCPM, which enables customers to create future forecasts based on historical accounting transactions imported into their Salesforce environments. Place Technology is expanding this product with our Predictive Support Module, enabling customer support teams and other clients to easily extract and store data.

Each customer has their own personalized version of Salesforce installed in a cloud environment called a Salesforce Organization. It is necessary for independent software vendor partners to provide customer support for the products they sell using the Salesforce customer base.

Our Predictive Support Module makes it easier for customer support to retrieve log data and analyze it so that they can resolve issues the customer may have. This is achieved through a Salesforce Managed Package that sends data to a log aggregator for further analysis by customer support.

The Predictive Support Module is available on the Salesforce AppExchange for installation onto a customer’s Salesforce Organization, similar to downloading an application onto an iPhone from the App Store. After being installed and configured, the module sends data from Salesforce objects to a log aggregator either on demand or at a predetermined interval specified by an organization’s administrator.

The customer can create a support issue, add additional information to the issue (including log data), and forward it to customer support. The two log aggregators the customer can choose between are Datadog and the ELK Stack.