BetterCloud: Integration Center
The Challenge
In creating a SaaS management tool such as BetterCloud, one of the key aspects is allowing your customers integrate the products they use on a day to day basis to get the most value out of their purchase. In 2017, BetterCloud needed to expand it's offering of Integrations in order to expand our reach into the SaaS world and truly become the leader in #SaaSOps.
At the time, our process of creating these integrations was an entirely custom built in house solution, involving a lot of work to accommodate each SaaS product's authentication and API needs. While these initial 7 integrations we provided out of the box covered a vast amount of our customers needs, there were still use cases that were missed by not being able to include applications we weren't able to write in house code to connect yet.Discovery
Through extensive customer interviews, it was apparent there were some main pain points that were common between many users:
- I need more information about what integrations BetterCloud offers, as well as what the capabilities of that integration would be.
- I would like to be able to browser integrations by their use cases, and possibly use this information to inform my next SaaS purchases.
- I need to be able to add integrations not inherently provided by BetterCloud in order to meet my use cases.
While presenting and categorizing our current set of integrations was a relatively easy design task, the others posed some unique challenges; there is no prevailing standard for authentication to different SaaS products, nor exposed API's to be able to accommodate what the users would like to do within BetterCloud.
I wanted to craft a solution that could a) scale as we add more integrations, b) allow content & copy to be editable by someone outside of the engineering team, and c) improve the initial integration experience to allow for needs of many different authentication types, or a custom integration of the end users own design.
The New Integration Center
To assist the discovery and understanding of the Integrations we provided, I reconfigured the connector feature to our Integration Center, providing an exhaustive list of all of our Integrations, their level of integration with BetterCloud, and what use cases they attempt to resolve.
Key features include:
- Detailed list of all Integrations, and their associated use cases, fed by data from Contenful CMS as to let Product Managers update our integration information as needed without the involvement from engineering.
- Provide details about what permissions are required for each integration, Actions available from this app in our Workflow product, and additional API information to further extend the integrations. Also provide cues to the user if an Integration requires and update or reauthentication in order to continue to function properly.
- Allow more advanced users the ability to create their own Custom Integrations via BetterCloud API, and provide relevant documentation when needed.
- Configuration Based UI: Input fields needed for integrating different applications would be read from their configuration profile, allowing us to generate the integration wizards automatically rather than a front end team having to custom create each one as we had previously done.