Context Service in Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM)
Introduction
In today’s digital era, everyone would like to utilize data for personalized and context-aware experience and this is true in the world of Salesforce as well. There is an increasing demand from the businesses to build an application that delivers personalized and relevant experience to their customer by utilizing the data they have across various cloud infrastructure they have on the Salesforce platform.
In the Salesforce platform, Accessing data across various cloud platforms and massaging it to provide personalized and context-aware experiences is one of the most important architectural design considerations. Context Service enables businesses to simply source, process and serve business data in the digital process at scale in the RLM.
You might think that Context Service is new but in reality it’s not a new concept. Context Services is a former functionality of Velocity that has existed successfully and plays a crucial role in providing the data that templates need to render content. This service is now available with UI based user friendly functionality in RLM.
What is Context Services?
Context service is a flexible platform that allows you to build and manage context-aware applications. It is a platform to simplify the data access across multiple clouds, optimize it and helps eliminate redundant inputs to process data. It is no code designer based services which is flexible and scalable enough to easily embed into any CRM application and extensible by customer and partners.
Content Services is a layer which listens to the data request sent by application and loads all necessary data onto itself and distributes the required data to specific processes to satisfy the request from application.
Where Context Service can be useful?
Flexibility and scalability to access data across the clouds might sound like music to ears but it’s now possible. Context Services makes it possible. Let’s understand where we can use Context Service in the context of Revenue Lifecycle Management.
Below table represents how Context Services in RLM can be used for the functionality implemented using Salesforce CPQ & Billing features
How to design Context Services?
Let’s understand how to design Context Services.
- Define Context Definitions
Context Definition is the set of information which includes nodes, attributes, context tags and mappings. Node is the user defined container/object which includes attributes(also referred as fields) mapped to real data by mapping. Nodes and attributes in the nodes require Context Tags to query data from the context definition by consuming application.
Mapping also refer as Context Mapping is the next key step in defining Context Definition. Mapping of Nodes and it’s attribute to the input data source are called Context Mapping. Typically, input data source is Salesforce Objects in context of Revenue Lifecycle Management
- Use Context Service in a Flow or Procedure
Defining the screen flow or procedure is the most common way to use Context Services. Context Services must be active to use in either Flow or procedure.
