FuseIT’s Sitecore to Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration, S4D, captures the field values in Sitecore web forms and submits them to Dynamic entities, usually leads or contacts. S4D targets enterprise companies with multiple CRM instances, high numbers of form submitters, and complex processing. The real-time integration improves data quality, deals with lead conversion, and ensures form fdata is not lost if the network connection to Dynamics fails
FuseIT announces the release of S4D, a Sitecore to Microsoft Dynamics 365 real-time bidirectional integration. S4D is centered around sending Sitecore web form submissions to Dynamic entities, typically to leads or contacts. Sitecore content managers who create web forms are able to use S4D to map the form fields to Dynamics. S4D works in real-time so when a website visitor completes a form, the form values are instantly available to the Dynamics sales team.
About S4D
S4D extends FuseIT’s range of integration products that includes S4S, the popular enterprise Sitecore to Salesforce integration. FuseIT’s move into the Microsoft Dynamics space may be viewed by some as late. When questioned on this, FuseIT’s CEO, Terry Humphris, said, “Customers were asking for integrations that better meet the needs of the market so we listened and delivered”. Given the success of S4S, Humphris said, “It made sense to take the learnings of S4S and apply them to integrating Sitecore with Dynamics. Salesforce and Dynamics are, after all, cloud-based CRMs with similar data schemas”. The resulting S4D integration is a greenfield project built from scratch with several features even being pushed back into S4S.
What are the challenges that S4D solves?
S4D is a no-code integration that captures the field values in Sitecore web forms and submits them to Dynamic entities. There are a number of challenges that have been overcome, namely, preventing duplicates, ensuring good data is not overwritten by bad, dealing with lead conversion, updating related entities, and capturing the form field values if the network connection to Dynamics is lost. There are also performance considerations when dealing with large companies that have multiple CRM instances, high numbers of form submitters, and/or use staging tables to pre-process inbound leads and contacts.
The S4D integration transacts data in real-time which makes it possible to use Dynamics as a single source of data. This improves data quality, eliminates sync jobs, enables transaction issues to be reported immediately, and allows remote data to be pretested before being overwritten. The alternative to transacting in real-time is batch processing or blind syncing. Batch processing creates duplicates in both systems, generates unreliable data due to transfer delays, is not able to deal with complex objects (and relationships), and has a number of other challenges.
FuseIT will be extending S4D in the coming months. The next task is to push the website behavior of each Siteore visitor to Dynamics when the visitor submits a web form. This provides intelligence to the sales team who are often tasked with contacting the visitor. Beyond this, S4D will be extended to allow the sales team to control the web experience of targeted Sitecore visitors from Dynamics.