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(For General Integration Facts that also apply to the pieces on this page, please review this article)

Sometimes it will be desirable to sync Activity data from one system to another.  This can be very beneficial for your users who may operate chiefly out of only one system, such as a Marketing team who only use HubSpot, but still need to see the Activity on Contacts from a Sales team who operate out of Dynamics CRM (or vice versa).

LyntonWeb offers Activity Syncing, in one direction or bidirectionally.  This allows you to reflect changes on Activity records from one system to another, but it requires many considerations.  Activities often belong to the same general "classes", such as Notes, Tasks, Phone Calls or Emails, but are not handled in the same way in any two Marketing, CRM, ERP or CMS systems.  You should work with your LyntonWeb Solution Architect to determine your needs, and we encourage you to provide examples of your expectations and to be as specific as possible.

A diagram of syncing Tasks from CRM to HubSpot may look like this:

Here are some technical details on what to discuss and expect from Activity Syncing:

• Activity Syncing will operate separately from your "regular" sync of Contacts, Accounts, etc.  However, parts of the Activity Sync may rely on other data already being present in your source and target systems.  If a Note exists in HubSpot on a certain Contact record and that Note is eligible to sync to Dynamics CRM, but that HubSpot Contact record has not yet synced into Dynamics CRM, then that HubSpot Note will either fail to sync or will not be associated with the correct Contact in Dynamics.  This should be considered carefully when designing your sync logic, and we can help answer any questions around restrictions like these.
• As with all of our integration processes that run on bulk data, this sync operates on a schedule, and may be subject to delays if there are high quantities of changes in the source system.  It does not operate in real-time as it must run through web services, and as a result can only operate as fast as your system will provide data when we ask for it.  Under normal circumstances, you can rely on data syncing within 5-10 minutes.  However, if you send out an email campaign that generates 20,000 new Email activities, it will take longer to "catch up".  We cannot estimate the duration of these delays in advance as they are subject to many different variables including the complexity of your sync logic.
• Activities may be represented very differently in different systems, and may have different requirements.  For instance, in HubSpot, Activities can only be viewed by examining their record's Timeline.  If an Activity is imported without being successfully associated to an existing HubSpot record (Contact, Company, etc), it will effectively be "orphaned" and invisible to any user.  Some systems may also require certain fields be populated, which may or may not be part of your source data.  For all of these reasons, the numbers of Activities which may successfully sync and be accessible in one system may differ from what exists in the other.  We can guide you through the particulars as we discuss your integration plan.
• Some systems have more or fewer fields than others.  For instance, Dynamics CRM Emails have a great number of fields for tracking activity around that email and persons or companies involved at different levels.  In addition, some systems may or may not allow customization of Activity records, so adding more fields or properties may not be possible.  For instance, Dynamics CRM Activity records allow some types of changes, but HubSpot records do not, so the fields or properties that can be synced may be limited.
• Likewise, because we may not have the ability to customize records, we may need to use an external database of our own to store non-identifying tracking information.  Normally when we write to a target record, we store the target record's ID back onto the source record for later retrieval.  This is necessary to avoid creating duplicate records in a target system, in case an existing record is updated or otherwise needs to be reprocessed.
• Note that our ability to detect pre-existing Activity records is usually limited to records we have Created through the integration.  This means that if your users have double-entered Activity data into both systems being used for sync, it is likely that our integration will need to Create and Update a new duplicate Activity record in the target system.