CB-salesforce-to-sharepoint

SharePoint collaboration: a new level with CB SharePoint Exchange Sync

Zsolt BekeProducts and Solutions Leave a Comment

Business and user preferences hand-in-hand

Business best practices and end-user preferences are often a world apart. Business administrators like having everything under control. They love using centralized solutions providing a comprehensive overview of all the project-related processes. End-users, on the other hand, prefer solutions that are user-friendly, sleek and intuitive. Now you can satisfy both.

SharePoint collaboration extends capabilities

For a project manager, SharePoint is heaven-sent. It enables you to organize all the project-related information into one system, including calendars, documents, emails, appointments, contacts and tasks. All the vital data are at your fingertips within one unified environment. It also provides an at-a-glance view on project status with all the relevant details, as well as information on user availability.

SharePoint user adoption beyond document sharing is, however, a fundamentally different matter.

Organizing project stakeholders and team members is often like herding cats. It’s typically an exhilarating project on its own requiring a meticulous, well-planned and well-orchestrated approach. Moreover, they all have their distinct roles, functions and, most importantly, preferences.

But there’s something they all like: things that are spotless and always at hand. That’s why they’d pick Exchange / Outlook for schedule planning and PIM management over SharePoint every time. And now we’re enabling you to bring these two worlds together.

Freedom and control coming together

With CB SharePoint Exchange Sync, you can combine the best-of-breed SharePoint collaboration, document and project management features. Thus enabling task creation, assignment and tracking, with the intuitive and mobile-ready environment of Outlook. This ensures immediate user adoption while granting you full control over project execution.

CB SharePoint Exchange Sync features easy one-way or two-way sync of business entities between SharePoint and Exchange, providing seamless, secure integration between the two systems. CB SharePoint Exchange Sync synchronizes items between SharePoint and Exchange. In this way it enables you and your team to maximize productivity and collaboration by giving you the flexibility to manage your team from within SharePoint.

SharePoint to Exchange Sync Features

CB SharePoint to Exchange Sync enables automatic, event-based (push) one-way and two-way synchronization of calendars, tasks, contacts and e-mails (for archiving purposes with attachments) between SharePoint and Exchange.

The service establishes automatic mapping of SharePoint users to Exchange users. This mapping can be modified and customized via a dedicated user interface. Also, it provides a conflict resolution mechanism, automatically capturing sync item conflicts.

In case of interrupted connections to SharePoint or Exchange, the service is able to auto recover. This feature enables the service to automatically resume the synchronization of changes.

Supported SharePoint versions: SharePoint 2013 and 2016
Supported Exchange versions: Exchange 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, Office 365

Solution architecture

The architecture of CB SharePoint Exchange Sync is composed of several inter-connected components. It has been designed with easy deployment, scalability and maintenance in mind.

SharePoint-Exchange-in-text

Main components

1) Sync Services: The Sync Services component listens to changes from both SharePoint (through its Add-in) and Exchange (event-based). The component then communicates with Connect Bridge to read further information about the changes that occurred in SharePoint or Exchange, analyzes these changes and validates them against the business rules. If it detects that a change is required to be written to the other system, it synchronizes these changes to the other system through the Connect Bridge platform.

2) SharePoint Add-in: The purpose of this Add-in is to collect all the events (such as creating a task, meeting or contact) that occur in SharePoint and result in updating an item in Exchange. The service adds extra links to the SharePoint list types (contacts, e-mails, tasks or calendar) to enable you to integrate those entities with Exchange. These links are added via SharePoint standard custom actions.

3) The Connect Bridge platform: The service uses Connect Bridge to read the changes from one system and write them to the other system. For example, if you create a task in SharePoint, Connect Bridge will read the details of that task from SharePoint and subsequently also insert that task to Exchange.

Please do stay tuned to our blog to learn more about this, and other powerful solutions transforming SharePoint collaboration, document management and teamwork.

Why Customers use Exchange SharePoint Sync

Watch a short video to find out:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

For security, use of Google's reCAPTCHA service is required which is subject to the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

I agree to these terms.