Integrating CRM with other applications is a very common requirement nowadays. Depending on the business model, every company requires some sort of application to manage their accounting, financial, inventory, retail management, communication, and other requirements. Although we can customize CRM to have these features, it can't be built at the enterprise level. Then it becomes a requirement to integrate CRM with another application system that provides these inbuilt features, such as Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains (GP), Microsoft Dynamics Axapta (Ax), Microsoft Dynamics Navision (NAV), and others. For example, we may want to process the send sales order and line item details from CRM to Ax to maintain the inventory or we may want to send invoices to GP so that payment and related taxes can be handled.
While talking about data integration, we move data back and forth between different applications using two broad categories:
- On demand
- Batch processing
In the case of on demand integration, we want to bring or send data to other applications once only; for example we may have one button to validate the inventory while adding product on orders, or we may want to validate address information using any third-party address verification tools, so the data moves between the two applications synchronously. The most common way of implementing these types of integration is using a plug-in in the CRM. Plug-ins are server-side components associated with specific events and execute a particular business logic when that event happens. We will be working with plug-ins in the next chapter. In the case of CRM on-premise we can easily integrate plug-ins with other applications, but in the case of online we need to keep security restrictions in mind. You can refer to https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg334752.aspx for more details on security.
In batch processing we integrate data between two systems in bulk, mostly asynchronously. Normally we develop jobs that are a combination of different options and are submitted to the queue manager responsible for their execution. These jobs can be executed after a specified time periodically. For these types of requirement, we can develop Windows services, asynchronous plug-ins, and custom workflows. We can also have a utility that can work with Windows scheduler.
We can implement integration between CRM and other systems by using connectors/add-ons available on the market or can write our own custom connector utilities. For example if we want to connect to other Microsoft Dynamics products we can utilize the Dynamics connector released by Microsoft on customer source.
Note
The following are the URLs for downloading the connector from customer source:
- https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/northamerica/AX/downloads/service-packs/mdax_dynamicsconnector
- https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/northamerica/GP/downloads/service-packs/mdgp_dynamicsconnector
- https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/northamerica/NAV/downloads/service-packs/mdnav_dynamicsconnector
- https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/northamerica/SL/downloads/service-packs/mdsl_dynamicsconnector
These connectors provide default data mapping between the source and target systems. For example, the following screenshot shows the default mapping between Microsoft Dynamics Ax and CRM:
connectorAxtoCRM
Apart from the preceding connector, there are other third-party connectors available. Apart from these connectors, we have other options such as scribe (http://www.scribesoft.com/microsoft_dynamics_crm) and Kingsway's SSIS connector (http://www.kingswaysoft.com/products/ssis-integration-toolkit-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm). We can also check for different connectors in Microsoft Pinpoint (https://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-ae).