Integrating Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Mark Smith, 26 March 2011

Integration between Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics NAV has arrived with the release of the Connector for Microsoft Dynamics. If you have a customer relationship solution that is based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, then you can integrate it with Microsoft Dynamics NAV with the Connector for Microsoft Dynamics. The Connector enables simple integration and data synchronization between Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 or Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.Giving you access to up-to-date customer/account information in both systems.

The Connector for Microsoft Dynamics is intended to be used in an implementation where Microsoft Dynamics CRM is used to manage business contacts, track leads, enter sales orders, and perform other sales and marketing activities, and where Microsoft Dynamics NAV is used to perform accounting functions, manage your company’s chart of accounts, and maintain customer, item, salesperson, and other records.

You use the Connector for Microsoft Dynamics to synchronize the types of data that are common to both customer relationship and NAV, such as customer, contact, and sales order information. As you work with this data, you can keep the information in both systems up-to-date. For example, you can use the customer information that is in Microsoft Dynamics NAV to fill in an order form that a salesperson creates in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Although integration is designed to work without customizations, for the best results, you must customize it to reflect your business and customer processes and needs.

Here's an example on where integration between Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics NAV can really support a business process:

The marketing manager uses CRM to manage her campaigns, opportunities and leads. When the leads are qualified they can be converted into a CRM Account. With integration enabled, this account subsequently becomes a customer in NAV. It's now possible for the sales team or customer service representatives to create orders in either CRM or NAV depending on their business process. The sales order will be integrated to NAV where the planning, payment processes, and shipping are handled, taking advantage of the core strengths of NAV.

The following entities can be integrated once you have the Connector installed and working.

The Connector for Microsoft Dynamics uses web services to read and write data from CRM and NAV. It has two adapters for our solution that are designed to integrate with NAV and with CRM. During configuration of the adapters, it is possible to specify which entities you want to integrate, which companies will be integrated, etc. so once the adapters are configured you can see a company-to-company integration with all the entities that you plan to integrate between the two systems. 

The entities are synchronized through the use of maps which indicate which field in NAV relates to which field in CRM. For example, Customer Name in the Customer table in NAV may relate to the Customer Name in the Account entity in CRM. The systems can be kept in synch on a schedule that works for each entity. So for example, it might be that you want to synchronize your customer information from NAV to CRM every hour but you may only want to synchronize item data from NAV to create products in CRM on a weekly basis.

When the Connector runs, changes made to data in NAV that have been identified as data that will be integrated will trigger a field to be updated with a date/time stamp indicating that a change was made. The Connector can then query this date and look for changes via the web services since the last time the integration ran and write those changes to the destination system.