Scribe Software Blog

Insight 7.6 Released – Featuring Performance Improvements

Scribe Insight 7.6 is now available for download. Insight 7.6 features a number of updates to the core to better support bulk operations with Adapter for Salesforce and to add bulk operations support for the Adapter for Dynamics CRM. The Insight 7.6 release also includes fixes for customer reported issues and other defects in the core product and the adapters for Dynamics CRM, Salesforce and Web Services.

Adapter for Salesforce

• With the Adapter for Salesforce, Insight now supports bulk Insert, Upsert, Update and Delete operations. Previously the adapter supported only bulk Insert operations.
• Using bulk operations can dramatically reduce the number of hits against the Salesforce API.
• For Salesforce target connections, you can now select the Upsert operation from the Configure Target dialog box. Upsert is available for both basic and bulk operation along with any of the available target configuration settings.

Adapter for Dynamics CRM

• For the Adapter for Dynamics CRM, Insight now supports bulk Insert, Update and Delete operations.
• The message priority feature, introduced with Insight v7.5.2, is now available for the Publisher for Dynamics CRM.
• Message Priority for Dynamics CRM 2011 Publishers. Insight Version 7.5.2 introduced the message priority feature for managing messages. With this release, the message priority feature is now available when configuring the Dynamics CRM 2011 Publisher.

Insight Core

• Extended support for bulk operations. For data stores that support bulk operations (such as Dynamics CRM and Salesforce), you can now configure DTS files to specify bulk processing with basic insert, update, and delete.

  You can now set bulk operations for individual steps within a DTS file. Prior to Insight Version 7.6, the Bulk Insert feature was set for the entire DTS file, rather than for each step. When you open a DTS file that uses the Bulk Insert feature, the Bulk Insert mode settings will be configured on each step of the DTS file. While this feature adds flexibility, it also requires careful DTS design. Be sure to read Using Bulk Operations in the Scribe Insight Online Help before configuring bulk operations.

• New Insight Help Library. The Scribe Insight Help Library is undergoing an upgrade. For the new library, we are using a new help authoring tool, which gives us support for multiple browsers, and makes it easier to maintain. Online Help for the following applications is available from the new Insight Help Library:
  • Scribe Insight v7.6.0
  • Scribe Adapter for Dynamics CRM v5.3
  • Scribe Adapter for Salesforce v2.7
  • Scribe Adapter for Web Services v1.5
  • Scribe Jumpstart: Dynamics AX to Dynamics CRM

Online Help for the remaining applications is available from the original Insight Help Library. Over the next few months, we will migrate the help for these products to the new help library.

Release Notes

If you would like to see more information about Insight 7.6 and related adapters you can download the release notes, which include the requirements, information about the upgrade process, and notes about specific defects that were fixed.

• Insight release notes
• Adapter for Dynamics CRM release notes
• Adapter for Salesforce release notes
• Adapter for Web Services release notes

Write ERP Errors Message Back to CRM

Let me share a story about Bob, a frustrated order processor in need of a tightly integrated system... Bob is processing an order in Dynamics CRM. He pushes the “Submit Order Button” confidently knowing that the order is whizzing around servers, surfing thru the clouds, and eventually landing in the appropriate ERP system. While all of this integration goodness happens his customer waits patiently on the phone. They both await for the all-important Confirmation Number. This number shows up in CRM once the order is accepted in the ERP system, it is the indicator of Order Success.  Pressing the F5 key to refreshe the screen he waits. No Confirmation Number appears. 

“The computers must be a little slow today,” he says with nervousness in his voice. “How is the weather in your city? We just had several inches of rain.” He adds, “...Well, you don’t need to wait any longer. When this Confirmation Number comes back I will give you a ring back. Have a great day, and thanks again for your order.”

Needless to say, Bob is a bit frustrated that he is unable to get a confirmation that the order had made its way into their ERP system. He quickly dials the phone and calls his IT help desk. “Where is my order number? What is going on back there? I had a customer on the phone and…”

The fact is that a CRM to ERP integration can fail for myriad reasons. The customer may be on Credit Hold, or the product that is being ordered is not in stock, or is discontinued. This is a major challenge of “loose integrations”, that is, where the business logic is not replicated in both systems. So if a failure happens in one system the other system needs to be notified of the failure.

What can be done to address the issue specifically with end users? 

In Insight version 7 we introduced a new feature called “Multi Target”. This feature allows one to build a .dts that writes to multiple objects, including the source object. In this article I will show you how to capture the error message and send it back to CRM so the user can see the status of the order, almost immediately. 

Step 1 – Create a Field for the Error Message

First in Dynamics CRM you will want to create, or reuse a field on the Order to send the message into. In my example here, I am creating a field and placing it on the top of the form. However you could use many mechanisms for this. You could create an activity and send an e-mail to the Order Owner, or add a Note to the Order, or create and entry in the Activity feed if that was being used. In this example I am just going to put the error into the Description field. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 2 Add a Connection to Source CRM system

In this example I am going to use a sample .dts, from one of our templates, whose source is XML and whose target is an ERP system. This XML comes to the .dts from the CRM Publisher; so we need a connection to the Dynamics CRM adapter that we can use as another target.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 3 – Add Step to Update CRM Order as the Last Step

From the configure steps window, add an update step Sales Orders. Don’t forget to define the lookup link on the SalesOrderId.

Step 4 – Push all the Failed Steps to the Order Update Step You Just Added

All the steps need to have their Fail option set to goto the Update CRM Order steps.

 

 

 

 

Step 5 – Edit Step 5 to Copy the Error Message Into the Field You Designated in Step 1.

You can prefix the message with some text or just put the data straight in. The formula that copies the error message is GETROWERROR().This function will return any error information that occurred while processing a row.

  

 

 

 

Step 6 – Run the .dts and ERP Error Shows On the CRM Order Screen

When the .dts encounters an error, two things occur. First the DTS will record an error in the event log allowing for any notification settings in the console to notify the appropriate individuals of the error.  Second, and most importantly, the ERP error will show up on the screen in CRM.

Considering a new Cloud CRM System? Software Advice offers their insights.

If you're considering a new Cloud CRM system, here's an interesting perspective from Lauren Carlson, of Software Advice. Her article shares the top 5 Cloud CRM applications she believes are worth consideration before you make your decision where to go in the cloud.

The Five Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform – 4. Supportability

Last time I discussed the need for easy transferability of the ongoing management of integration solutions from development to production. I will now discuss the fourth capability essential to a collaborative integration platform, Supportability.

Moving an integration process into production introduces the same set of challenges as moving any application or solution out of QA into production. Users always use application in ways that were not contemplated by the original integration design, resulting in unexpected errors and exceptions. Modifying the design of the end point applications after the integration is implemented may disrupt the integration processes. Changes to the overall IT environment may interrupt connections between the various applications. In short, business happens and things stop working or not work as intended. Your integration approach should include a robust set of error detection, diagnosis and remediation tools.

Is there a way to proactively monitor the health of the integration and raise alerts when things are not functioning properly? Are there meaningful execution and error logs that enable someone to quickly identify the root cause of any issue? Does the integration process have built in re-try mechanisms that address any timing issues (for example, attempting to process an order transaction before the related customer record has been created in your target application)?

A major area to consider with any integration solution is the ability to handle gracefully upgrades to your business applications. For example, if a customer moves from Dynamics CRM 4.0 to Dynamics CRM 2011, what will the impact be on the integration? Is the upgrade simply a testing exercise where things for the large part continue to work or does it require a re-write of the integration? The best integration solutions create an abstraction layer between the integration processes themselves and the API of the endpoint applications. The process only sees the abstracted interface and when the endpoint application is upgraded, it is simply a matter of modifying the interface between the API and the abstraction layer. If you are looking at 3^rd party adapter products, make sure you interrogate this question fully. You will be glad you did later.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the integration approach needs to be very reliable. In other words, "It just needs to work". The best integration is one that no one ever knows about or notices (of course, until it stops working and then it gets a lot of attention). Integration solutions that are not rock solid are disruptive and costly to your business as well a significant drain on your resources. Users may not trust the data they are looking at and go to other methods that may be more time consuming and costly to the business. They may stop using the CRM system all together and cobble their own "system" which completely defeats the purpose of your CRM implementation and integration. Your resources that could be on other, more important projects are now working on fixing that integration – again.

In the next and final installment, I conclude with a discussion of the need for expandability.

The 5 Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform – 2. Flexibility

This is the next installment of the posts I started in April about the key capabilities of a collaborative integration platform. It has been over a month since I blogged about the first in the series about Reusability. Things got a bit away from me over the last five weeks but I hope to pick up the pace. So here it goes. The second big capability is Flexibility.

Flexibility

Integration requires a flexible approach. There are infinite varieties of integration needs as there are customers and business systems. One key driver of this variability is industry. The integration processes across different vertical markets can be dramatically different. Take for example, the integration of an order process between CRM and ERP in a distribution company versus a capital goods manufacturer. The integration for the distribution company is going to very transaction intensive with paramount emphasis on ensuring that the sales and services teams have up to date information on the location and delivery schedules of goods, while the capital goods manufacturer will likely focus on leveraging back office data about their customers to up-sell and cross-sell additional products and services. Integration processes can also vary greatly within industries based on differences in business models from company to company. A simple example is the difference between a direct selling and a channel selling organization.

Typical areas of variability in integration design include:

• The data design of each business application involved and the transformations needed to resolve the design differences between those business applications,
• The rules of data ownership: which system is the master of what data; which systems can insert or update certain records or fields; etc.,
• The actions that trigger integration events and the rules to process those integrations.

Beware of pre-packaged integration solutions, particularly around this issue of flexibility. They may seem a lot easier to implement, but may not give the user close to what their business requires. Even if a customer can take advantage of a pre-packaged integration solution, the solution will almost always require modification to address the customer's needs. These changes can range from minimal to extensive depending on how unique the business requirements are.

Custom code to achieve integration has a major advantage where it offers unlimited flexibility to meet a customer's needs. There is no limit to what can be accomplished provided that one has the resources with the skills and time necessary. The downside is cost in people, time, and money including the initial cost of the implementing the integration project and the ongoing costs of supporting and modifying the integration over time. The cost of custom code is always more expensive and can be out of reach for some customers. For many customers, the right answer is a third party integration tool that combines a graphical user interface, templates for common integration scenarios, and significant depth of configuration capabilities. An integration tool gives customers to the ability get exactly what they need while significantly reducing (or in some cases, eliminating) the costs and complexity of a custom coded integration.

Next up…Transferability.

 

Introducing the 5 Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform

In my previous blog post, I spoke of the changing role of the partner brought on by the advent of cloud computing. In this new world, partners are moving away from a reliance on 'systems integration' and moving towards creating value-added industry focused solutions. A critical component to these solutions is the need to help companies make sense of the integration requirements to other business applications and data sources. When developing an integration approach, it is important to recognize the different and evolving roles between the partner and customer throughout the phases of an application deployment. Even if there isn't a partner involved, in many cases IT organizations act in a similar capacity as partner to the business to deliver a successful CRM project. A collaborative approach to integration between "partner" and "customer" best serves the integration needs of companies deploying these business applications.

It is rare that one person has all of the skills and knowledge necessary to fully implement an integration solution. In a CRM integration project for example, the development of the integration requires a solid understanding of the design of the CRM system and the key customer processes that drive the integration need. It also requires detailed knowledge of the other applications, many of them complex back office applications. The ability to allow multiple people to participate in the development and design of the integration solution in a coordinated manner is essential. Each of the parties should be able to design their discrete piece and simply fold it into the broader solution. The other members of the project team should be able to easily understand the work others have done and should be able add their input and comments. Team members that have moved onto other projects should be able to easily move back into an active role.

So beyond these team development capabilities what does a collaborative approach to integration really mean? Over the new few weeks I will be exploring the 5 capabilities of a collaborative integration platform. This exploration should shed some light on the direction we are headed with our new integration platform, Scribe Online, as well as some of the continued investments we will be making in Scribe Insight. So watch for my next post as we drill down on the first capability; Reusability.

Salesforce.com to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Migration Template

We now have a template that will help you migrate data from Salesforce.com to Microsoft Dynamics CRM version 4 or version 2011. The template takes care of the basics of account, lead, and activity data.

Here is a list of the data the template migrates.

• Account records
• Contact records
• Activity records
• Un-converted Leads
• Attachments

When the template runs, it creates key cross reference relationships for the primary IDs for accounts, contacts, and leads. With the graphical environment in the Scribe Workbench it should be relatively easy to extend the template to handle other types of data related to these three objects, or to other objects.

You can learn more about the template and how to implement it by watching this tutorial video or by reading the template guide. The guide has more details about the template including the field mappings. You can download the template from the Samples section of our template download page.

User Conference Session: Scribe Adapter for Salesforce - may the force be with you!

 Fellow Scribers - I’ve been a Technical Pre-sales Engineer here for the past 3.5 years, and am thrilled we’re holding our very first 2010 Scribe User Conference here in Bedford, NH on September 23^rd and 24^th.  If you’ve ever visited New England in late September or early October, you know that this is our “leaf peeping” season where one will be in awe of nature’s brilliant crimsons and golds of fall.  All of us here at Scribe will be as energized as the foliage colors, and look forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones. 

And now the rest of the story…

Has there been a time when you purchased a product, loaded with all the bells and whistles, and soon came to realize you only use a small subset of the total feature set available?  It’s not that you didn’t need all those features, but you have just become more at ease with the some more than others, right?  If you resemble this description, as I do, it’s time to travel over to the other side to the pathway of many abilities!  Journey with me and learn how you can leverage these robust “diamond in the rough” features to deliver even more value than you are currently experiencing.

In our session covering the Scribe Adapter for Salesforce, we will be discussing the detail of available features that are sometimes overlooked.  Features that can be very performance strategic when designing a migration project to populate your Salesforce deployment.  Features that will allow your integration processes to run more efficiently and at the same time minimizing your hit count against the Force.com web service.  We all know the results of maxing out on your available API hits, don’t we?

We will also be demonstrating a few use case scenarios (migration and integration) where you will see the Scribe Adapter for Salesforce in action.  Below is a sneak preview of our planned coming attractions:

1.    Support for multi-record “Upsert” operations to maximize performance.

2.    Support of data compression and multi-record bulk operations to maximize performance.

3.    Publishing data out of Salesforce by using Outbound Messaging.  This feature not only improves performance but also minimizes API hit count due to the fact that data is pushed out of SFDC, not pulled.

We feel that our session will be of significant and compelling content from which you can walk away feeling the force is with you.   Until we speak again, remember… A Scriber gains power through understanding!

Scribe Sales Order Component

Were you aware that Scribe provides a free custom application for Salesforce called the Scribe Sales Order Component? Salesforce out-of-the-box does not provide a full-fledged Sales Order entity. For many of our customers who integrate Salesforce to a backend ERP system such as Dynamics GP, converting opportunities to sales orders in Salesforce prior to synchronizing those orders into the ERP system represents a much more natural order flow – and this is precisely what the Scribe Sales Order Component provides.

The Scribe Sales Order Component is required for use with our Microsoft Dynamics GP to Salesforce integration template.  It provides the ability to convert opportunities to a custom sales order entity, and then view and maintain these sales orders.  Using Scribe Insight and the GP to Salesforce integration template, these orders are submitted to GP for processing.  The Scribe Sales Order Component also provides a Custom Dashboard and a set of reports to track orders placed in Salesforce.

 We have recently made a technology upgrade to Scribe Sales Order Component. The previous version of the Scribe Sales Order Component  was written using s-controls, which Salesforce recently announced are being discontinued. This new version of the Scribe Sales Order Component is based VisualForce pages and Apex classes to ensure our ability to expand and enhance the product in the future, consistent with Salesforce's technology roadmap. The new version of the Scribe Sales Order Component provides the exact same functionality as the prior version, albeit on Salesforce's new technology platform.

Customers using the previous Scribe Sales Order Component do not need to upgrade their component as Salesforce will continue to support s-controls for the foreseeable future. All new implementations wishing to use the Scribe Sales Order Component should utilize the latest version, available from the Salesforce AppExchange.

For more information on the Scribe Sales Order Component and how to install see: http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016ZMHEA2

Recorded Webcast: Using Scribe Insight to integrate Microsoft Dynamics NAV to Web Services, SharePoint and Salesforce.com

Scribe Insight is the ideal tool for connecting Dynamics NAV to your organization's data sources and applications. In this recorded webcast you will see demonstrations of integrations from Microsoft Dynamics NAV to Web Services, SharePoint and Salesforce.com

Click here to view the recorded webcast