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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived) / Populate CRM With Data...
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

Populate CRM With Data From External Website

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Posted on by MDS 1,781

I'm going to ask a few - I think - fairly fundamental questions here, so please excuse my ignorance...

We are considering using a 3rd party website to gather data that will initially be held in the 3rd party database before ultimately being written into to CRM using the Web API.

At the moment, it's essentially an application form for a club. The applicants answer a series of questions on the web site, this is then written into the database (from here the data goes to an application and CRM - hence the "holding" database model) and then it needs to find its way into CRM.

My remit is to ready CRM for this data but I'm not sure exactly what the 3rd party (people writing the API routine) will need - and they don't either at this stage as they haven't used the API before. A simple example:

I've created a custom entity - Application Form. This is where a lot of the data from the website will end up. Things like - application number, referral information, etc all clearly belong in this entity but other information that's being captured -eg: contact information, company information etc - clearly belong in Contact and Account respectively. How do I manage this? If I were dealing with just the CRM aspect of it, it would be simply a case of lookups from one entity to another, but when having to accomodate the 3rd party data and how it's written to CRM, I have no idea.

I hope this makes sense, and welcome any advice/comments...

Thanks in advance..

*This post is locked for comments

  • Verified answer
    prt33k Profile Picture
    prt33k 6,907 on at
    RE: Populate CRM With Data From External Website

    Its very much possible using CRM WebAPI however you need to code and build a framework for that.

    From your example it appears like a scheduled job which trigger every 15min to sync the data will work. For this scenario, you can use SSIS as technology which can serve the purpose - it will read data from intermediary database and then push it in CRM. Pushing in CRM can be done using custom code(Script Task) or you can use third party tool like kingswaysoft.

    For real time sync- you can write web service which will be a pure custom C# code usings CRM SDK/API.

    KignswaySoft provide SSIS adpater which I dont think will fit if you are going with webservice as solution.

    Thanks,

    PS

  • MDS Profile Picture
    MDS 1,781 on at
    RE: Populate CRM With Data From External Website

    Hi prt33k,

    Thank you for your reply.

    It doesn't necessarily need to be realtime, but by the same token, we don't want to wait hours for it to appear in CRM either.

    The data that is input to the website will first be written to an intermediary database. From here, there is some logic which runs and sends the data to one of two places, either CRM or another system depending on a set criteria which doesn't really concern us in terms of the CRM side of things.

    From your examples above, the Realtime scenario sounds most like what we would like to achieve and your method example makes perfect sense. Using this scenario, do we need to consider 3rd party applications such as Scribe or Kingswaysoft, or can it all be achieved using the standard Microsoft facilities - CRM WebAPI etc?

    Thank you.

  • Suggested answer
    prt33k Profile Picture
    prt33k 6,907 on at
    RE: Populate CRM With Data From External Website

    Hi MDS,

    Few questions:

    1. Will the sync be real time i.e. as soon as user create record in wensite, you want it to be in CRM.
    2. Is there another database where the data will be stored and sync to multiple system including CRM

    Realtime:

    Usually its better to write a web service layer which handles the business logic and order of creation etc and serves as interface between CRM and Website.

    So suppose portal user submit the form which has information of 'Application','Account' and 'Contact' then in my web service will have method called as ProcessInformation() which in turn calls 'CreateAccount', 'CreateContact' and 'CreateApplication'. In case anything fails you can inform the interface through exception

    Batch Process:

    Here you can use 3rd party tool or SSIS to do the job however even there you need to apply the business logic e.g in SSIS you need to have control folow task for Account first and then Contact and then Information.

    Thanks,

    PS

  • MDS Profile Picture
    MDS 1,781 on at
    RE: Populate CRM With Data From External Website

    Thank you all for your replies, it's certainly very helpful for me to gain some understanding of the process.

    You've all mentioned 3rd party applications to perform the data push into CRM. Am I to assume that the MS Web API doesn't do this natively?

    It strikes me that it could be potentially quite complicated. Eg - a new applicant inputs his personal details, company details, club application specific details. This information needs feeding into CRM but I would imagine it needs to be entered in a particular order - probably account info, contact info, application info?

    As far as my original query goes with regard to readying CRM for this data, would I be right to assume all I need to do is create the required fields and document their names for the developer?

    Many thanks once again.

  • Suggested answer
    Zohaib Uddin Khan Profile Picture
    Zohaib Uddin Khan 2,811 on at
    RE: Populate CRM With Data From External Website

    Two approaches:

    1. Use 3rd party integration tools such as KingswaySoft or Scribe. (Recommended)

    2. Write your own Integration library (but more effort and take longer).

  • Suggested answer
    Drew Poggemann Profile Picture
    Drew Poggemann 4 on at
    RE: Populate CRM With Data From External Website

    I would suggest utilizing Kingsway, smartconnect, or scribe.  This type of integration is standard for each of these tools.

    Thanks,

  • ashlega Profile Picture
    ashlega 34,477 on at
    RE: Populate CRM With Data From External Website

    You might try a few things:

    - The application pushing data to CRM might take care of all the lookups etc. Not sure if you want it since that would give you little control over how it's done

    - You might get all the data into a local database instead of sending it directly to CRM, and, then, create an SSIS package to upload that data to CRM (will need a CRM connector though.. might try kingswaysoft). In this case, you might prepare data in the local DB using SQL queries, for instance.. so all the lookups would be "ready" 

    - You might use excel import (so you would need them to give you an excel spreadsheet with all the data) - that would be semi-automated, though (although, it's possible to write a console app to automate that process)

    There are, probably, at least a few more options to consider.. actually, you might ask them to dump "plain" data into an intermediary entity in CRM, and, then, parse it somehow (for that, might create a plugin.. but again, it depends on whether you are familiar with the API-s etc, and what's the reason you are using 3d party to load data to CRM.. if you can write your own plugins/custom actions, it should not be a problem to set up the lookups etc as soon as you get "plain" data from the web site)

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