Provide users data from Salesforce to third party application

Question

I'm trying to find the best way to connect a Salesforce account with a third party application. The idea is to import all SF account user's data to the application so all these user's will have an automatically created accounts into this app. So SF clients can give access on their users to our app with ... hopefully one/two clicks. For now I know about these two options:

1. Export user's data and import
2. Providing some permitted user account (user/pass/token - permissions to only read user's list) to our third party app and it will take the data via SF API
3. ... Something more easy for the SF account holder, because first two options are really not the expected workarounds and I'll be glad if someone can help here. :)

Thanks.

Answer 1

What platform is the other application running on? If it's web-based I would implement a webservice which Salesforce can connect to on demand (i.e. when the account owner desires) to send the account information over.

This is probably the easiest solution available, and you could trigger the code either from a trigger when a field has been set on the account (you'll need to use the @future annotation on the method doing the callout) or you could implement a Visualforce page to handle it and display potential errors etc.

Answer 2

Actually I found that oAuth login and access will work perfectly for my requirements.

PHP example can be found here:

http://developer.force.com/cookbook/recipe/interact-with-the-forcecom-rest-api-from-php