Sometimes you may have separate Dynamics CRM installations or instances to help better run your organization. Different departments use CRM software for different reasons. For example, your marketing and sales departments will use it for your customers, suspects and prospects. In order to manage the payroll side for your sales department, Human Resources may use it for your employees to calculate their commission on sales. The problem people come across is that usually your CRM and ERP software solutions can talk to each other, but not your CRM instances.
Synchronization is one of those can’t-live-without tools that many of us use with our smart devices. Did you know there’s a similar tool available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM? It’s called the Instance Adapter, and it lets organizations with separate Dynamics CRM installations or instances selectively synchronize entities.
The Instance Adapter is available for use with the Microsoft Connector, so you’ll first need to have that installed. If you aren’t familiar with the Microsoft Connector, check out our blog post “New Productivity Pack for Dynamics GP to Dynamics CRM Connector“. By the way, the Connector is free to Dynamics CRM customers. The Instance Adapter is a great tool for organizations that need to share say, Contacts or Leads. The Adapter handles all the communications and authentication nitty-gritty between two different Dynamics Customer Relationship Management instances. Administrators just need to map the appropriate entities from source to destination CRMs.
Last month, Microsoft released an update to the Instance Adapter to fix some issues that users were experiencing when syncing a few of the entities, including Products, Invoices, Quotes, Opportunities, and Activities. This has all been corrected.
Looking for a CRM system that will allow you to have various instances and synchronize? Contact us for more information about Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Instance Adapter.
