Special Edition Using® Microsoft® CRM

Going Offline/Synchronizing

As mentioned previously, CRMSO users are taking a copy of their CRM data offline to work with it and later synchronize it back to the main corporate CRM database. By the very nature of this process there are always issues and challenges. Principally, some of the major challenges involved in working with offline data sets are

• Amount of data to take offline

• Data Conflicts

• Recovery from dropped connections or hardware failure

• Scalability

Each of these challenges is examined in detail in the following sections.

Amount of Data to Take Offline

The rule of thumb on the amount of data to take offline is simple—the less the better. Obviously, from a functional perspective, we want as much data as possible. However, from a technical ...