Enterprise Data Integration Strategies with CRM 2011

In case you missed the excellent presentation by Daniel Cai in XrmVirtual about the different data integration strategies for CRM, you can view the recording here.

Data integration is a very common scenario in enterprise CRM implementations. Therefore it is important to understand what the options are and what the advantages and disadvantages are. Here is a small extract from Daniel’s presentation about 4 different data integration options:

 

1. CRM 2011 Import Data Wizard

What’s it?

• Free utilities offered by the platform

Pros

• Works for simple and small data import scenarios
  
• Works within application, available for CRM users for self-served data
• imports
  
• Undoable
      works well for new insert, but not update though
  
• Free

Cons

• No delete
       don’t confuse with the above undo capability
  
• No transformation
  
• No scheduling, no automation
  
• Difficult to manage incremental changes
  
• Maximum number of records is constrained by file size
  
• Limited capability of handling relationship
  
• Exceptions to be expected when used for some special entities, fields

 

2. Custom Integration Development

How does it work?

• Write custom code against CRM web service interfaces using SDK or service references

Pros

• Leverage your .NET programming (C# or VB.NET) skills
  
• More granular control
  
• Flexible integration points
      Plugins
      Workflows
      Standalone applications (Console, Windows Form, and probably third-party apps)

Cons

• Could be an exhaustive effort, particularly when infrastructure coding is involved
      Scheduling
      Threading
      Intricacies of working with CRM web service interfaces
• Most likely much higher maintenance cost down the road
• Often the case, the implementation ends up with a tightly-coupled architecture style, which leads to poor maintainability

3. ETL Tools

What’s ETL

• Extract, Transform, Load

Pros

• Development Productivity
  
• Visual development environment for data flows and control flow tasks
  
• Scheduling engine
  
• Performance
  
• Scalability
  
• Extensibility
  
• Can be part of your overall BI and data warehousing strategies

Cons

• Learning curve of the ETL tool
  
• Extra license cost of the ETL tool and/or the adapters
  
• Probably not ideal solution for real-time requirements

Options

• SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services)
  
• Informatica
  
• Scribe
  
• Connectors for Microsoft Dynamics
  
• …

 

4. Service Bus / BizTalk

What’s service bus?

• A software architecture model used for designing and implementing the interaction and communication between mutually interacting software applications in service-oriented architecture (SOA)

Pros

• Messaging based approach
       Optimized to move single transactions between different systems or processes in near real time or real time
• Decoupled integration architectural model
       Best suited for decoupled heterogeneous systems by using a middleware

Cons

• Probably not best fit with large volume data load
• Performance overhead due to serialization and deserialization
  

 

Thanks to Daniel for sharing. I have also provided a Spanish translation of this post here.