DMC’s client has several thousand employees and uses Salesforce as their primary Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. While a small portion of the company uses Salesforce on a daily basis, the majority of employees do not interact with the Salesforce platform.

DMC was tasked with creating an easy way for users to access and maintain Salesforce data directly from SharePoint. To accomplish this, DMC designed and developed a system that automatically extracts data from Salesforce and synchronizes the data with a SharePoint List. This solution also synchronizes data changes made in SharePoint with the Salesforce CRM.  DMC’s custom solution is high-performance and capable of syncing data quickly, efficiently, and reliably.

DMC started by creating a SharePoint list that contained a subset of the most frequently edited fields on a Salesforce Quote. New or modified data was read from Salesforce, and then copied into the corresponding SharePoint list item. Functionality was then added to allow fields edited on SharePoint to also sync back to Salesforce.

The synchronization service runs every 15 minutes, and retrieves items only if they have been modified within that time frame. After retrieving the item, the server checks which fields have been modified, then writes those fields to the other platform. Synchronizing only updated records significantly reduced the amount of network activity and shortened the overall time the service takes to run.

One challenge the solution had to overcome was determining what to do when a Salesforce record is modified at the same time as a SharePoint list item. This challenge was resolved by designating Salesforce as the platform of record. The service used logic to ignore SharePoint changes if the corresponding Salesforce item has been modified since the last time the service checked for changes.  A conflict could only occur if the same record was changed in both systems within the same 15-minute time window.

Another challenge the solution overcame was a mismatch in the time format used by SharePoint and Salesforce when syncing data. One platform was reading dates in Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) and storing dates in Local Time, while the other was reading and storing dates in UTC. This issue was resolved within the sync process by converting all dates to local time before doing any comparisons.

DMC’s solution allows for quick and reliable data synchronization between Salesforce and SharePoint. The system enabled company-wide read and write access to critical CRM data. This solution also allows users to choose which platform they want to work in so they can be most efficient.

Learn more about DMC's Microsoft SharePoint services.