Custom Journey Builder Flow Control Activity

Question

I would like to build a custom journey builder flow control activity to read directly into Salesforce org with field encryption. This is to bypass the need to bring entry data into marketing cloud.

Would need expert advice on the possibility of this? Our challenge now is to find out if we can access shield encrypted salesforce fields through marketing cloud connect in our custom journey builder application so that we can read into the shield encrypted fields.

Any advice or suggestions would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

I can't speak to the Journey Builder side of things, but Marketing Cloud Connect works with fields encrypted by Shield Platform Encryption. Shield Platform Encryption wouldn't be a blocker.

Answer 2

The basic answer is yes it is possible but it may not be optimal. Essentially any custom activity would just need access to the SFDC API (which still works under shield). You will need a Microservice like Heroku or Lambda to do act as Middleware/Custom UI. The main sticking points here will be 1) journey Builder doesn't batch calls to sfdc, they are one by one, which means that you may get issues when dealing with large volumes of contacts in the journey or complex/large objects in SFDC, not to mention API call limits in SFDC. 2) journey Builder calls to the Microservice do not encrypt data beyond the SSL encryption in transport. This may be a no-go for the security team if they are implementing Shield since it could be seen as a security gap. Hope that helps!