Summer 16 release has a feature called “Lightning Sync”. It let’s Salesforce users sync contacts and events with Lightning Sync from Exchange Server of their organization. Let’s have a quick session to Helping users sync contacts and events with Lightning Sync.
Step-By-Step:
Assumption : This post assumes that you already have a working Microsoft Exchange product with you or you have the connection details form you Exchange administrator. For this article “Helping Users Sync Contacts and Events with Lightning Sync” I could secure a trail account from Microsoft Team. You will need a service account from Exchange Admin , which will be used to connect Salesforce and Exchange. To create a service account you can follow the steps mentioned in the article from salesforce. Click Here.
1. Search for lightning Sync in the setup > Quick Find
2. First enable the Lightning Sync
3. Once you enable the setting you will need the service account to connect to exchange server.
4. Once you have completed the connection details you can test the connection by using one of the existing users email address. If you see the message such as the above image you are good to go.
The email does not exists in the Exchange may be, then you will get the error: ”
5. Once the above step goes well, then next step is to create a configuration. You can create multiple configurations for different profiles and purposes.
6. You will have something similar screen once you save your config:
Name: You can put any name
Active : Check this to activate the configuration
Description : Put a description for your reference
Assign Users and Profiles: You can assign the configuration to a specific user or a profile so that a group of user can use the configuration.
Data Setting: This section lets you decide what and how to sync. In case there is a conflict which record takes precedence etc. This is also the place where you will map the fields. The field mapping tells the system which field from Salesforce goes to which field of exchange and vice-versa.
7. That’s it about “Helping users sync contacts and events with Lightning Sync”. If you have connected properly you can now go to the sync status page and see something similar to the below screenshot.
NOTE: Some important points to note here is, this sync will only work if the email address matches in both salesforce and exchange. So if you have an user as test@getthekt.com in salesforce, you have to have the same email address in exchange to sync the records. Usually this is the case most of the time. The users in Salesforce will have the same email in exchange as well. Just thought of point it out 🙂
Some testing :
- Let’s create a Contact in Salesforce:
-
-
- contact in salesforce
-
- Login to your Outlook and you can see the created contact there …. voila….
3. Now let’s create an Event using the user we have synced in Salesforce
4. You will notice the Event from Salesforce will not get synced or created in Exchange as the sync direction is only from Exchange to Salesforce.
5. Now created some Calendar entries in Exchange and you will see them in Salesforce in some time. As in the below screenshot you will see there are some calendar entries which are from Exchange to Salesforce.
Conclusion
Hope this article will give you some start-up point for this feature, just released by Salesforce. Stay tuned for some more posts sooner.
Keep reading and sharing …….
Leave a Reply