Oracle CPQ Cloud and Sales Cloud integration: SSO (part two)

This blog post is part of a multi-part technical series that explores a few "gotchas" that you might come across when integrating Oracle CPQ Cloud and Oracle Sales Cloud. This short post focuses on Single Sign-On to ensure a seamless flow for your sales users.

This blog post is the second in a series of technical blogs exploring a few interesting scenarios that you may come across if you decide to integrate Oracle Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) Cloud and Oracle Sales Cloud. If you’d like to read the other posts within this series, please click the links below:

Part one - Lead to Quote: An introduction to Oracle CPQ Cloud and Sales Cloud integration

Part three - Oracle CPQ Cloud and Sales Cloud integration: Integration files

Part four - Oracle CPQ Cloud and Sales Cloud integration: Integration users

Introduction #

For the seamless flow between the applications to work, you need to consider Single Sign-On (SSO); and that is the focus of this short post. This means that if a user is logged-in to one application, they don’t need to re-enter their login credentials to use the other application. Although not strictly necessary, enabling SSO will let users use both applications in a single, uninterrupted flow, which greatly contributes to a positive and productive user experience. This is even more important when one of these applications is used in an embedded context within another--such as the case with Oracle's CPQ Cloud and Sales Cloud as we've implemented it.

To set this up you need to decide which application will perform the role of Identity Provider (IdP), or in other words, which application is in charge of authenticating users and has to be logged into first.

The first "gotcha" to remember is that the integration we are using will only work if the browser being used by the end-users has been set to accept third party cookies. This is because the SSO provisioned here is a SAML-based integration, which in this implementation relies on the exchange of cookies between the two applications to work (you can find out more details in the SAML technical overview, section 4.1.1). Having your browser block third party cookies prevents these from being received properly, and causes SSO to fail.

If your organization doesn’t allow employee’s browsers to accept third party cookies, add your CPQ Cloud website as an exception in your browser to always accept cookies.

Hopefully this short post was helpful; we believe it's essential to focus on delivery of a seamless user experience when putting Oracle CPQ Cloud together with Oracle Sales Cloud. Keep an eye out on the main series post for further updates.

Find Out More about CPQ Cloud and Sales Cloud integration #

If you do want to engage with us to discuss any of the topics discussed here, or talk about concerns you have with ongoing Cloud projects or projects you’re about to embark on, email us or call us today on +44 203 2834315 to speak to one of our experts.