Microsoft Dynamics Connector Overview

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Gainsight NXT

IMPORTANT - Articles Impacted due to 6.34 October NXT Release

Due to the v6.34 October, 2022 release, this article has been impacted. Steps, images, and playable GIFs in this article will soon be updated to reflect the latest changes.

For more information about the latest UI changes, click here.

This article is the first in a series of articles that explains how to integrate data from Microsoft Dynamics 365 connector with Gainsight NXT. This article introduces the Dynamics 365 Connector and briefly explains the various tasks involved in configuring this connector.

Overview

Microsoft Dynamics 365 connector enables Dynamics Customer Relationship Management (CRM) users to connect to Gainsight NXT. Once your Dynamics CRM is connected with Gainsight NXT, users can sync their Dynamics CRM data with Gainsight NXT. You can sync data from any Dynamics CRM entity to Gainsight NXT Standard or Custom objects. To learn more about Gainsight NXT objects, refer to the Gainsight Data Management article. The Dynamics connector is located on the Administration > Connectors 2.0 > Connectors tab.

Some common terms used in our Dynamics 365 connector articles are listed below. These words and their associated descriptions are exclusively related to the Gainsight NXT product.

Gainsight NXT: Gainsight’s state of the art CRM tool which is highly flexible and allows you to connect to other CRMs.
Dynamics CRM instance: A Dynamics CRM tenant to which a connection must be established and then authorized.
Connection: A connection is a link between Gainsight NXT and Dynamics CRM.
Authorization: The process of allowing Gainsight NXT to access your Dynamics CRM instance.
Open Authorization (OAuth): The authorization protocol used to authorize Gainsight NXT to access a Dynamics CRM instance.
Data Sync: The process of fetching data from the Dynamics CRM database and ingesting it into corresponding Gainsight object.
Data sync jobs: A Data sync job is an activity which syncs data from Dynamics CRM entities to Gainsight Objects.
Out of the box job: Default Data sync job which is created after authorizing a Dynamics CRM instance is known as an out of the box job. Gainsight NXT creates one out of the box data sync job.

To configure the Dynamics 365 connector, you must execute four tasks. These tasks are shown below:

Create Connection: This task establishes a connection between Gainsight NXT and Dynamics CRM org. To learn more about this process, refer to the Create Connection article.
authorize Connection: This task authorizes Gainsight NXT to access data from your Dynamics CRM org. To learn more about this process, refer to the authorize Connection article.
(Optional) Modify Out of the box jobs: This task allows admins to modify the configurations for out of the box jobs. To learn more about this process, refer to the Out of the Box Jobs article.
Create Data sync jobs: This task allows admins to create new data sync jobs. To learn more about this process, refer to the Create Data Sync Jobs article.

Prerequisites

OAuth user should have API access in Dynamics 365. If you do not wish to provide global admin access to Gainsight, refer to the Dynamics 365 Connection Authorization article to learn about an alternative solution.

Limitations

You can only directly map field of type "Customer" (Whose value is id of record from the look up entity Account/Contact). However, you cannot map any field from its lookup object (Account/Contact).