A tailored application

Our digital maturity has reached a level where we have crossed the line towards a 360°-view of our customers, and websites are more than just a company presentation or an engagement platform. The entire system landscape of a company is digital. We’re truly fully digital! And a website should not exist as a separate entity anymore. It needs to be integrated into the business to provide customers with more targeted, personalized experiences. CRM Connect for Kentico by EMAKINA offers a system integration solution for Kentico and Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce.

How it works

CRM Connect is based on a flexible middleware approach and consists of the following components:

• A Kentico module – To configure the data that will be transferred from Kentico to the middleware application. It also provides a basic UI for triggering synchronizations manually and monitoring transmitted workflows and messages.
• A middleware application – Which consists of a REST API and several services to transform and transfer data between Kentico and your CRM. All services, as well as the REST API, are connected to each other via a message queue.

The following graphic illustrates an overview of the CRM Connect for Kentico architecture:

Supported Scenarios

1. Synchronizing form submissions: Specific online form submissions can be transferred automatically to your CRM. For example, every entry of a user registration form can be transformed into a lead in your CRM.
2. Synchronizing users: Users from a website can be transferred automatically to your CRM. For example, every registered website user can be transformed into a lead in your CRM.
3. Synchronizing contacts: Contacts from a website can be transferred automatically to your CRM. For example, every non-anonymous visitor of your website can be transformed into a lead in your CRM.
4. Synchronizing contacts, event-based: Contacts from a website can be transferred automatically to your CRM in real time. For example, every anonymous visitor of your website can be transformed into a lead in your CRM the moment they turn into a non-anonymous visitor.
5. Synchronizing contacts bidirectionally: Contacts from a website can be transferred automatically to your CRM and the other way around. For example, every change within your CRM's contacts can be synchronized with the corresponding contact in Kentico.

Triggers

There are three ways in which data can be synchronized between Kentico and your CRM: Manually, time-based, and event-based.

• Manual synchronization: Data can be synchronized between Kentico and your CRM manually. The Kentico module provides options to perform either a full or delta synchronization.
• Time-based synchronization: Data can be synchronized between Kentico and your CRM based on a given interval (e.g., every hour) or a fixed time (e.g., daily at 1 AM).
• Event-based synchronization: Data can be synchronized from Kentico to your CRM based on events that occur within Kentico. The Kentico module will then listen to data change events and transmit them to the middleware application. This option is recommended if you need to synchronize data from Kentico to your CRM in real-time. Event-based synchronization from your CRM to Kentico is not supported by default, because it would depend on a deep, complex, and non-generic configuration of the CRM system.

Supported systems

• Kentico 10, Kentico 11
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 (online), Microsoft Dynamics 365 (on-premises), Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 or Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online
• Salesforce

Roadmap

CRM Connect for Kentico gets extended constantly. Here's what to expect next:

• A more generic approach for the synchronization, so that basically any core entitiy within Kentico can be synchronized instead of webforms, users and contacts only.
• The ability to host CRM Connect in the cloud.
• New services to connect to other systems, e.g. to ESP, ERP, or PIM systems.
• The ability for other developers to create own services.
• The ability to connect the monitoring component to a sophisticated data analysis tool like Elasticsearch