KBA-01024: How do I synchronize my Customers, Vendors, and Employees?

Question:

How can I synchronize my Microsoft Dynamics SL customers, vendors, and employees in Spitfire?

Answer:

Synchronization is performed by special stored procedures that can run in SQL Server Agent jobs. To ensure that your Customers, Vendors, and Employees are synchronized automatically, be sure to create these SQL Server Agent jobs and then adjust the schedule for these jobs to meet your company‘s requirements.

To create your SQL Server Agent job to synchronize customers and vendors:

  1. In the Spitfire Configuration Tool (ICTOOL.exe), move to the SQL tab.
  2. In the SQL tab, select the Jobs sub-tab.
  3. In the left panel, select the Contacts jobs.
  4. Notice that the text on the right advises you that a) the job has not been created or b) that the job already exists in SQL Server.
  5. If the job does not exist in SQL Server Agent, right-click on the job and select Create.
    Note: In SQL Server Agent, Spitfire will create the Full Synch Customers and Vendors-xxxxxx  job (xxxxx being your Spitfire database name) with the default schedule of running at 5:00 AM on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
  6. In ICTool, move to the Dynamics SL tab.
  7. In the Synchronize section, select (check) Customers and/or Vendors.
    Note: Your SQL Agent job will look here to determine if you want to synchronize Customers only, Vendors only, or both.
  8. If you made a change on the Dynamics SL tab in Step 7, move to the Finish tab, select Configure sfPMS and click the Update Configuration button to activate your change.

To include employees in your SQL Server Agent job:

  1. In SQL Server Agent, click on Jobs.
  2. Right-click on your Full Synch Customers and Vendors-xxxxxx  job and select Properties.
  3. On the General tab, modify the job‘s name to include Employees.
  4. On the Steps tab, click New.
  5. In Name, enter a name for this step, for example Synchronize Employees.
  6. In Database, use the drop-down to select your Spitfire database.
  7. In Command, type exec dbo.pss_EmployeeUsers 0 and click OK to save your new step.
  8. Back on the Steps tab, to organize the steps to run in sequence, highlight your Synchronize Employees step and click the Up arrow at the bottom of the window to move it from 3rd to 2nd place.
    Note: You may also manually edit your 2nd step to ‘go to the next step‘ and then edit the 3rd step to ‘quit on success.‘
  9. Click OK.
  10. In ICTool, move to the Dynamics SL tab.
  11. In the Synchronize section, select (check) Employees.
    Note: Your SQL Agent job will look here to determine if you want to include Employees in your synchronization. If you leave Employees unchecked, then only users who are Microsoft Dynamics users will be synchronized.
  12. If you made a change on the Dynamics SL tab in Step 7, move to the Finish tab, select Configure sfPMS and click the Update Configuration button to activate your change.

The stored procedures used to synchronize contacts in Microsoft Dynamics SL to Spitfire are:

  • dbo.pss_CustomerContacts
  • dbo.pss_VendorContacts
  • dbo.pss_EmployeeUsers

Or instead of creating the jobs from the ICTool, you can also create the SQL Agent jobs manually from Enterprise Manager.

Recommendations:

  1. Create two jobs: one to run nightly at perhaps 5AM.  Pass a zero (0) parameter to each stored procedure.  This version of the job takes slightly longer to run, but updates all changed records.
  2. Create a job with no parameter passed to the stored procedure.  Run this job at some interval you deem appropriate.  This job only processes records with timestamps indicated they were modified since the last run.
  3. The volatility of customers and vendors at your site may differ.  If you have 1000s of vendors and a small number of customers you might want independent jobs and different schedules.

Additional Comments:

Once created, your SQL Server Agent Full Synch Customers and Vendors-xxxxxx  job will run on the default schedule. The default schedule is 5:00 AM on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.Note: Be sure that SQL Agent is running and set to start automatically when SQL Server starts up.


KBA-01024; Last updated: November 14, 2016 at 12:33 pm;
Keywords:  solomon unified contact synchronization customers vendors dynamics employees