Synchra

Organizations often have more than one location within their computer systems where contacts of different types are stored.  These contacts could be internal employees, external vendors, church members, contractors, or others.  The systems in which they’re stored could be databases, Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange mailboxes and public folders, or web service-based repositories.  The challenge is to provide these contacts to users of multiple systems without having to manually enter them in each.  That’s where Synchra comes in.

Here’s an easy example of where Synchra makes sense.  You maintain your customers in a database.  However, you want to be able to email them from Outlook without having to look them up in the database each time.  Synchra makes this possible.  With Synchra, you could synchronize the contacts from the database into Exchange’s list of contacts.  Your users could then compose a new email to them, and select their name from within the Outlook client. 

Providers

Synchra is built around the concept of providers.  Providers are locations where contacts are stored.  We currently have the following providers.  More are being built, and we can write custom providers if you need one.

• Exchange Public Folders.  Source or destination provider.
• Exchange User Mailbox.  Source or destination provider.
• Active Directory.  Source or destination provider.  LDAP-based, so it might support other LDAP directories as well.  Has not been tested this way.
• Active Directory for existing users.  Destination provider.  If you have a source provider, you can update existing AD users by matching them to the source provider via email address or logon name.
• SQL Server.  Source provider (with plans to support it as a destination).  This is the means of supporting many current providers, such as Shelby, web site data, and other systems.
• XML/web services.  Source provider.  In progress.
• Custom system APIs.  We can build a provider if the vendor provides an API into the data.

Provider Mappings

Mappings are used to specify the source and destination provider.  Custom field mappings can be set up via the provider mappings.  Here's an example.



Providers dependencies can be set up.  For instance, you might do the following:

Database -> Public Folder -> Active Directory.

This is useful if you have some of the fields in the database, but plan on adding additional information to the contacts once they've been created in the public folder.  By syncing Active Directory from the public folder, you can access the fields from the database, as well as the fields that have been manually updated in the public folder.

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