Marketo in IFRAME in external app

[stevehandy]

We utilize an internal CRM and have set up a sync through a third party SFTP process. We are having difficulty showing our sales team activity and the journey of their leads (web, email, etc.). Has anyone else encountered this challenge?

Would be great if we could utilize an iFrame highlighting the activity panel of a contact - but that seems to be blocked on the Marketo side. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

The Marketo UI isn’t allowed to be IFRAMEd, correct.

But I think you’re barking up the wrong tree anyway as (a) seeing all marketing activities would overwhelm sales, and (b) some of those log items leak information that should be entirely within marketing.

You should instead extract selected activities periodically using the Marketo REST API. Import them into a db, perhaps even the same db you use for your CRM. Then you can build any UI you want on top of that.

[stevehandy]

Sanford - thank you so much for the update and also the reply.

We previously had Marketo and then left, went to HubSpot and came back to Marketo. During our first integration, we used the API connection for integration but had a lot of issues when things were changed on our end and it would require development work by our team. In order to make it more straight forward, we decided to do SFTP for the integration rather than the API. Do you think it would be best to use that connection and try to feed in the (selected) activities that way?

[SanfordWhiteman]

I assume you mean you subscribe to the Marketo add-on that deposits files to your SFTP server. But that isn’t an alternative to the API per se.

As I understand it from the engineer who built it, it still uses the public API (with all of the associated restrictions), it just hides the API consumer code from you, i.e. you could build the same thing.

So the activity log you’d get on your SFTP server wouldn’t be different from the one you’d pull using the Bulk Extract.

[Jo_Pitts1]

@stevehandy ,

Extending from what @SanfordWhiteman  has said, what were the issues you had?  The bulk activity APIs are pretty robust, and if you changed things on your end it shouldn't impact on the dropping of data into your system.  If something changed that impacted the way that data was used, then yes - you'd have to make changes, but that'd be irrespective of the way you get the data into your database.

Regards

Jo