Astera Software is a leading provider of data and application integration solutions. Astera’s Centerprise Integration products are acclaimed for their performance, usability, and integration feature set. Centerprise has been developed in Microsoft .NET and provides connectivity to an array of databases, file formats, and cloud applications.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides a full-featured customer relationship management application. Dynamics CRM supports on-premise as well as in-cloud deployment and seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office and other Microsoft enterprise level applications.
This document describes the Dynamics CRM integration functionality in Centerprise, and discusses some technical concepts. A basic understanding of database and SQL is helpful.
Centerprise Data Integrator brings a natural and streamlined approach to integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. With Centerprise, Dynamics CRM looks and works exactly like a local database. Whether you are using on-premise deployment or using Dynamics CRM in the cloud, with Centerprise, the interaction is consistent and straightforward.
Centerprise delivers powerful data integration features, enterprise grade performance, an extensive and continuously expanding list of connectors, workflow orchestration, a built-in scheduler, and event-driven real time integration functionality. A high-performance, multi-threaded integration engine, combined with Microsoft Dynamics CRM specific optimizations, ensures that Centerprise will deliver the performance and scalability to efficiently process large initial and ongoing data volumes.
Integration has historically been one of the key issues for companies contemplating migrating to Dynamics CRM. Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM integration interface necessitates custom programming to integrate with databases and other applications. These integration programs are often expensive to build, difficult to maintain, and often perform poorly in production. Additionally, ongoing data query and updates are either difficult to perform or require significant and ongoing programming effort.
Centerprise takes the pain out of migrating to Dynamics CRM, and goes well beyond the initial migration. Centerprise delivers a full complement of features for ongoing integration with Dynamics CRM, so that business intelligence is collected, captured and shared throughout the enterprise, delivering the greatest value for enterprise investment. Ongoing integration examples can include periodic data transfers as well as real-time, event-driven data integration.
Centerprise also delivers the functionality that enables Dynamics CRM to appear and work as a local database. This enables the user to use many of Centerprise’s advanced data workflow features, including drag-and-drop dataflows to a powerful SQL-based language that provide the functionality to query, insert, update, and delete data.
Centerprise dataflow provides a drag-and-drop interface that enables users to define sophisticated integration flows. With Centerprise dataflows, you can define complex data integration jobs using a simple drag-and-drop interface. The following screenshots show an example of Centerprise dataflow.
Centerprise combines its high performance parallel processing architecture and the bulk load capability of Dynamics CRM to deliver high data load performance. This enables users to load large amounts of data at rapid speed.
A number of other optimization techniques are used to improve performance. These include intelligent lookup caching, parallel loaders, and more.
When you use the update action function while writing to Dynamics CRM, Centerprise batches updates and uses the bulk load capability to perform updates in batches. This eliminates single updates and substantially improves throughput.
You can also use SQL update and delete statements to perform updates to Dynamics CRM data.
Using Centerprise dataflow, you can quickly and easily build complex data extractions from Dynamics CRM. The extractions can span multiple tables and use sophisticated criteria on fields from multiple tables. You can choose to use drag-and-drop method and let Centerprise construct the query, or write query using Centerprise Query Language, an object-oriented, SQL style query language.
Centerprise Query Language is a SQL-style query language that enables users to query Dynamics CRM data using an object-oriented style of query. CQL uses Dynamics CRM data model entities and relationships to build queries that access data from multiple objects by traversing relationships. CQL syntax enables you to build complex queries using streamlined object syntax.
CQL where clause supports standard SQL constructs such as comparison and logical operators, in clause, and between and like operators. Additionally, the query language supports Dynamics CRM date operators such as yesterday, today, tomorrow, last week, this week, next week, and more.
Some examples of CQL queries are presented here to illustrate the power and simplicity of CQL syntax:
This query retrieves the specified fields from multiple entities and uses criteria spanning multiple entities as well.
select accountnumber, name, modifiedon, service_accounts.name ,
territory_accounts.name, account_master_account.name,
transactioncurrency_account.currencyname
from account
where transactioncurrency_account.currencyname = 'US Dollar'
and address1_city = 'Montreal' and modifiedon during last year
Business needs often necessitate ad hoc mass changes to application data. This may be due to a data loading error, result of policy changes, or to reflect changes in source data. While such changes are fairly easy to make in SQL-based databases, Microsoft Dynamics CRM does not have built-in capabilities to easily carry out such modifications.
Centerprise makes it easy to make such ad hoc changes using the familiar SQL syntax. Centerprise data manipulation statements can be used to insert, update, or delete records in Dynamics CRM. The following examples describe the syntax and capabilities of CQL for data manipulation.
The following SQL statement inserts a record in Dynamics CRM account entity:
insert into account (name, address1_name, address1_line1,
address1_city, address1_country)
values('John Smith', 'Home', '1234 Main Street',
'Los Angeles', 'USA')
This update statement uses a simple where clause with account key:
update account set name = 'New Name', address1_name = 'Home2'
where accountid = '5bf46381-af0c-e011-9dde-001f29c8e9a8'
This update statement is more complex where clause to update donotfax flag. Centerprise allows you to use any valid where clause in update and delete statements.
update account set donotfax ='1'
where accountratingcode ='1'
and modifiedon during last week
and transactioncurrency_account.currencyname = 'US Dollar'
Delete statements work similar to update statements in that you can specify any where clause for the delete statement. Here is an example using the where clause from the above update statement:
Delete from account
Centerprise Database Browser provides a tree view of the Dynamics CRM database. Database browser provides basic data management features such as view of table schema and keys, ability to query tables, and more.
Astera’s Salesforce.com to Dynamics CRM Migration package automates migration from Salesforce.com to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and removes the complexity, as well as some of the prohibitive cost, of migration. The Centerprise migration package contains workflows and dataflows that perform high speed conversion between base implementations. These flows can be quickly modified to reflect company-specific customizations.
The Centerprise Salesforce.com to Dynamics CRM migration package will have your enterprise conversion completed quickly, painlessly, and minimizes costly customized migrations.
Most enterprises have also built integration jobs between their on-premise enterprise applications, vendor or partner files or applications, and Salesforce.com. These integration jobs—batch and real time—must be converted to work with Dynamics CRM. Centerprise’s intuitive drag and drop interface enables you to develop, test, and deploy these integration jobs in a fraction of the time it would take via custom coding.