Getting help at work should never require an instruction manual. Yet historically, Salesforce employees looking for support with a technical issue needed to wrestle with many complex systems. The old process forced employees to navigate a series of dropdown hierarchies, turning simple help requests into complex puzzles that often led nowhere if you took a wrong turn.
With the help of Heroku, BaseCamp changed that. Now, employees get the help they need quickly and simply, so they can focus on doing their best work. This improved experience removes guesswork and gives employees a natural language interface to ask questions, find answers, or seamlessly route a ticket to the right team if they need someone to step in.
Unifying Salesforce Orgs: A single window for employee support
Salesforce’s internal ecosystem is complex, with a wide range of departments each running their own digital services. This model gives business units the flexibility they need but can create confusion for employees seeking support across the organization. With over 76,000 team members and dozens of different orgs at play, employees often didn’t know where to direct their questions.
To solve this, the internal BaseCamp team developed a unified support application, also known as BaseCamp, which serves as a single “pane of glass” for the entire company. BaseCamp unifies knowledge from multiple disparate Salesforce orgs while routing tickets to the appropriate teams, all behind a single interface built for employee usability.
We have dozens of Salesforce orgs spun up internally and we want the employee to not really have to care which Salesforce org or which service cloud they’re working with. It’s just one place to go, a single pane of glass for all of my requests and all my service needs.
How Heroku aggregates data from multiple Salesforce instances
The challenge was to seamlessly integrate multiple orgs, with Heroku providing the perfect solution to centralize data into one searchable interface. As Principal Engineer Josh Boyden explains, “Salesforce really is a standalone tenant, a standalone org that works on its own. But as soon as you expand out to multiple orgs, you then have the problem of how do you unify the data?”
Heroku solved this by serving as an integration layer between multiple Salesforce instances. The platform pulls knowledge from multiple different sources, aggregates it into a unified search experience, and routes support cases back to the appropriate teams across different service clouds.
Heroku is handling essentially everything on our back end, and then we use a Salesforce org as our front end. That’s what BaseCamp is hosted on, it’s an Experience Cloud hosted on Salesforce, and then we make calls from that Salesforce org to Heroku as our back-end service. It’s the API layer behind everything.
How Heroku powers BaseCamp
BaseCamp operates through multiple Java applications, all running on Heroku, and each handling a different aspect of the employee support experience. A knowledge application runs on dynos, continuously pulling content from multiple Salesforce orgs and aggregating it into a single, searchable database. When employees search BaseCamp, they get results from across the entire Salesforce organization, rather than having to track down where relevant information lives. If they need further assistance, a separate ticketing application routes those cases to the appropriate teams, ensuring requests reach the right people regardless of org boundaries.
BaseCamp also meets employees wherever they work, offering multiple ways to access support. In the browser, staff can search knowledge articles using natural language, quickly finding answers without navigating complex menus. Slack integration brings ticket management directly into conversations, syncing updates in real time with the right Salesforce cloud org. Employees can also interact with the Basecamp Agentforce agent available in Slack.
Greater support for the support team
It wasn’t just users that benefited from the switch to Heroku as the team behind BaseCamp did too. For members of the development team, Heroku’s greatest value lies in what they don’t have to think about due to Heroku’s automated security updates and zero-downtime deployments. Previously, deployments were managed across multiple virtual machines and even bare-metal servers, a fragile, time-consuming process that turned every release into a challenge. Now, the platform handles infrastructure management automatically, allowing the small engineering team to focus entirely on business value features that help Salesforce employees.
Code committed to the main branch automatically flows through development, QA, and staging environments with full test execution; production deployment can be confirmed with a button push. This automation extends to ongoing maintenance, with Heroku handling database patching, security updates, and scaling without requiring team intervention. The Heroku automation reliability is a real win for a small team with limited time to spare for managing infrastructure.
The best way to describe Heroku is when I need to use it, it just works. I can just build the tools that I need to build and not worry about the infrastructure portion.
Bringing it all together with Heroku
For the BaseCamp team, Salesforce provides business unit flexibility; Heroku provides the architectural glue to ensure that flexibility doesn’t break the user experience as orgs proliferate.
Heroku is the backbone of BaseCamp. It consolidates disparate sources of knowledge and support into one place, giving employees a seamless, consistent interface for all their requests. Business teams retain the freedom to customize their service environments, while employees no longer have to think about which org is running things behind the scenes. Everything is just unified, in Josh’s words: “Heroku really brings all that together for us.”
What’s next for BaseCamp?
The BaseCamp team remains focused on expanding its core mission: creating a unified view of all employee support needs at Salesforce. As more Salesforce orgs are brought into the fold, Heroku will continue to scale with it, serving as the integration layer that makes a seamless employee experience possible.
But the team isn’t standing still, thanks to Agentforce unlocking exciting new possibilities in AI-driven support. Certain processing tasks are pushing the limits of what can be achieved within Salesforce alone, and Heroku offers an opportunity to offload complex operations, from retrieval-augmented generation to the most advanced workflows. By combining the scale of Salesforce with the power of Heroku, BaseCamp is preparing to deliver even smarter, more proactive support experiences in the future.
Launch your next project with Heroku
How the team at BaseCamp did it
- Heroku Dynos form the basis for a number of applications which each handle different tasks
- Data is synchronized and unified across multiple internal Salesforce orgs with Heroku Connect
- Apache Kafka on Heroku enables communication between BaseCamp’s multiple services
- Heroku Key-Value Store provides in-memory caching to improve performance across each app
- Case updates in the Slack app are managed by Heroku Postgres, ensuring updates and state changes are posted to the right threads
