Today we'll be discussing strategies for deploying crm online where users are across continents. This is a very common scenario in large organizations where certain groups may have teams located in many different geographical areas.

One question I see in the newsgroup quite a bit is if a crm organization can be replicated to a different datacenter in a different location. In order for users in location A access database A and users in location B access database B. This cannot be done out of the box. But there many viable options.

Lets take a real example. Imagine a call center where users are in Singapore and in the USA. Users are basically using crm for tickets, so crm needs to be very quick and speedy.

Option A - Completely separate ORGs


The advantages of option A is that it is a simple approach. All data is separate and users access the crm org near them. The draw backs are clearly that no data is shared. So uses in Org A cannot assist or pickup tickets from Org B. In addition, reporting that needs to take into account data from Org A ad Org B are a bit more complex to write.

Option B - Two separate ORGs - Synchronize some of the data


The advantages of option B is that users in either Org A or Org B can see the same data thus can work on the same ticket. This allows for a ticket to be created in the USA, then later at night a user in Singapore can pickup the same ticket and continue to work on it.

So how is this done? Well there are many options, but we typically recommend 2 options for most clients.

1 - Custom windows service. A custom windows service can be created to synchronize data between the two organizations. This is the most costly in terms of development, but once it is created there are no ongoing costs OR costs related to the number of crm users.

2 - Scribe. Scribe is a 3rd party data migration and synchronization tool. The beauty of scribe is that is requires no custom code so such integration can be created much quicker than with custom code. However, there are ongoing licensing fees and fees that depend on the number of users.

Option C - A single organization

Option C is to utilize a single organization. This may sound simple, but careful planning needs to be done to make sure all users have an adequate access time. In this example, if users in the USA and in Singapore are in big metropolitan cities, then this is definitely doable.

However, one of the most important decisions will be to measure and test and determine where the single crm organization should be located. In this case, Singapore or the USA or even a middle location such as Europe.

For this scenario we recommend literally testing the latency from the end-users to test Orgs located in the USA, Singapore or an middle location such as Europe.

CRM Online has a built-in diagnostics

YourCRMOnly/tools/diagnostics/diag.aspx

This runs a built-in diagnostic tool that runs a series of tests including a latency test.

The goal is to have most users with a latency under 200 ms.

Well, that's it for today. Any questions feel free to email or ask them here.