Thomas Berndorfer is the CEO and founder of Connecting Software. One of Connecting Software’s best-selling products is CB Dynamics 365 to SharePoint Permissions Replicator, “a unique solution for all environments where you have Dynamics 365 and SharePoint”. This is a product that is now sold worldwide with great success. For a deeper understanding of it, Thomas Berndorfer lets us have an inside look at how such a critical software product came to being.

CB Dynamics 365 to SharePoint Permissions Replicator – the story behind a great idea

Where did the idea for this successful product come from? “There is an out-of-the-box integration by Microsoft” Thomas Berndorfer explains. “The problem is that they could not put the access and permissions rights from Dynamics 365 over the SharePoint folder and file structure”.

“In the early days, I think it was 2014, we presented our solution, Connect Bridge, to Microsoft”. From this presentation, a challenge arose: “If your fancy tool can do so much, can you do this?” Microsoft explained they had a problem with the permissions of Dynamics 365 when they wanted to store the documents in SharePoint. This was a global problem that customers from around the world faced. And nobody had found a solution yet.

CB Dynamics 365 to SharePoint Permissions Replicator – challenge accepted

Thomas Berndorfer went back to the company’s IT engineers. He told them about this problem “Our engineers were sitting there, and they were thinking that with Connect Bridge they could easily solve this.”. As Connect Bridge had already many man-years of effort put into it, it was a great leverage point to start from.

Connecting Software took on the challenge, and the development team started working. By using Connect Bridge, we built the solution and got it out to the real world in no time: “In three months they had a very nice prototype (…) after four months we got our first finance sector customer”. And so the CB Dynamics 365 to SharePoint Permissions Replicator was born!

CB Dynamics 365 to SharePoint Permissions Replicator – the journey so far

Thomas Berndorfer goes on to explain how the journey continued “Now in 2019, after five years, we have more than 200 installations.”. Our customers love having ONE document repository and knowing they are in control of what each user can access.

Among the happy customers, we have companies such as ZF, a global car parts maker, and the Compass Group, a food service giant that operates in more than 40 countries and employs more than 550,000 people (you can read about this in the Microsoft Partner website).

Our customers gave us so much inspiration and new ideas that during these five years, we have continuously worked on the product to meet all the requirements in the market. We also adjusted to new requirements. For example, in terms of regulations, GDPR came out and CB Replicator is 100% GDPR-compliant.

Connecting Software also started to make add-ons to provide a set of tools around the area of security within the D365 ecosystem. “We have built the SharePoint Site Constructor”, currently named SharePoint Structure Creator, and also made several other improvements to make sure the Replicator solution got better and better .”We have a no single point of failure concept and a load balancer”. Over time, we also added other products, like CB Dynamics 365 Seamless Attachment Extractor, making it a family of security products for D365 users.

In the end, we can say it was indeed a journey full of challenges “We are very proud to say that the whenever a challenge came, we were successful” in overcoming it.

You too can get CB Dynamics 365 to SharePoint Permissions Replicator

CB Replicator is the only out-of-the-box solution that prevents SharePoint users from accessing private documents and sensitive data for which they don’t have CRM privileges. It is a tried-and-true solution from a market leader, and you can get it yourself in a very straightforward way.

You can choose between the self-hosted version of CB Replicator or have it in the cloud (in Azure or Connecting Software servers). And, best of all, you can try it for free. There is no better way to grasp the full power of this solution than by trying it out yourself. Choose a SaaS free trial or a self-hosted free trial and go for it

By Ana Neto,

Software engineer since 1997, she is now a technical advisor for Connecting Software.

Connecting Software is a global producer of integration and synchronization software solutions since 2004.

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