It was a pretty long day today. We had a Conference Room Pilot session on CRM & GP Integrated Solution.

While doing the testing, the Consultants were pretty much cleared all possible scenarios in CRM and at critical stage, demonstrating the CRM to GP Sales Order Integration. Much to our frustration, integration failed. They checked everything: CRM Adapter Mapping, Customer Record, almost everything. Yes, ALMOST everything and NOT everything.

Could not trace out the issue and we continued with GP side testing. Once the session got over and End-Users left for the day, I and the Consultants started debugging the issue further.

I always had insisted every Developer to open eConnect Logs in case there is any issue with Integration Tool, Web Portal, Web Services and anything which uses eConnect as business logic. And I was right. eConnect stored the error messages for those failed transactions. And once we probed those messages, we got clarity. It was simple record issue and nothing to do with Integration Adapter. We have planned to correct the record and then continue with our next level testing.

One critical issue with this CRM to GP Adapter is that it does not intimate the User who enter the records in CRM about the validation errors. Something like “Customer Payment Terms does not exist.”, “Document ID does not exist.”, etc.

While we could still go and check the Adapter log or eConnect, how the User would come to know that he entered a wrong record and tried integrating it? This particular Adapter is not User-Friendly to the extent that we would like to see. Though it is in its initial phase, this is very basic.

If I don’t know what wrong I committed when I entered a record and forced to depend on a Consultant to trace the issue, it is really something which is clearly not a positive sign.

We still have to live with it, unless Microsoft Tech Team consider this and do something about it.

VAIDY