Virtual Customer Advisory - Real-time Bi-directional SFDC Sync

Virtual Customer Advisory - Real-time Bi-directional SFDC Sync
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Hi Community! We want your feedback via a live advisory session with our Product Management team

 

What is the Virtual Customer Advisory Meeting (VCAM) about?

We are designing a Real-Time Bi-directional sync capability with Salesforce through Connectors for Company and Person objects. This would help reduce the latency between Gainsight NXT and Salesforce without overriding changes in any system.
During this VCAM, we would like to discuss on the following

  • User scenarios or problems that should be solved with this functionality
  • Preparation and Configuration of a Real-Time Job
  • Intricacies of the Salesforce Account & Gainsight Company, Relationship constructs
  • For one session (Slot 3), we will focus more on Salesforce Contact or Account Contact Relation sync to Gainsight Person, Company Person or Relationship Person 
  • Presentation of initial mocks for Job Preparation, Configuration, and Audit Logs

 

Who is the right person to Enroll?
Gainsight Admins who have experience with Account/Contact objects in Salesforce and have implemented some form of data read/write capabilities in Gainsight with Salesforce. Familiarity with Connectors would be good to have. Reference: https://support.gainsight.com/Gainsight_NXT/Connectors_(Horizon_Experience) 


When is this happening?
We are planning sessions in 3rd & 4th week of March 2021

Slot 1: 19th March 2021 11:00A ET / 08:00A PT/ 09:30P IST
Slot 2: 22nd March 2021 10:30A ET / 07:30A PT/ 09:00P IST
Slot 3: 24th March 2021 11:00A ET / 08:00A PT/ 09:30P IST (Focus on Person)

 

What should you do?
Please register for the roundtable slots provided using this form.  We will reply back with a calendar invitation. If you are unable to use Google forms due to company restrictions you can email sbakshi@gainsight.com to sign up. 


19 replies

Userlevel 7
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@dan_ahrens What time zone are these in? 9PM??

 

Edit: appears to be IST based on the form, however, some of the time zone conversions seem off, or mislettered.

Userlevel 7
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Sorry about that @bradley . I updated the original post with the corrected times. 

Userlevel 7
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Sorry about that @bradley . I updated the original post with the corrected times. 

No worries, I can be dense. Though if PT means Pacific Time, then something is off, because it’s a three hour difference from Eastern Time (assuming that is what ET means here), not two. If it isn’t those time zones, disregard :)

Userlevel 7
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Edited one more time. I might need glasses. :)

 

 

Userlevel 7
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Not related to time zones:

Some pre-requisites for me to have bidirectional syncing:
 

  • Improve SFDC to MDA syncing FIRST
    • This is what I mean: 

       

    • If I can’t bring it into MDA properly in the first place then I’m not going to want problems going the other way. To me, this really NEEDS to be a priority. There needs to be baseline equivalency in what characters can be used.
  • Clarity on what field and data types MDA can bring in from SFDC, and specifically what the limitations are on those fields.
    • Lookups, formula(text) fields - can I report on them, digest them, group by etc?
    • Things like this are an issue coming into Gainsight and I can see them being an issue going out of Gainsight.
  • While I’m dreaming:
    •  would just be so nice.

Userlevel 7
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@dan_ahrens I was so excited by the title I signed up for the first session before I read the description. :yum:

May I ask you to elaborate a little on what you mean when you say “focus more on Salesforce Contact or Account Contact Relation sync to Gainsight Person, Company Person or Relationship Person”?

 

Also :100: to what Bradley said.  SFDC to MDA 1st.  We are currently experiencing a problem where non-Latin based alpha characters (i.e. Japanese) are getting munged into weird computer symbols when syncing to Person/Company Person (via rules - we had to move away from connectors because we couldn’t filter the way we needed to).  We have a critical ticket open with support on that now.  But I had to disable a bunch of reverse syncing back to SFDC for the exact reason Bradley states above. 

Userlevel 7
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@darkknight Don’t worry, I blazed in and signed up when the first session was still listed as 9PM 🙂 I can’t imagine having to handle other languages (not a problem we currently have) I just desperately need access to basic ENGLISH conventions like apostrophes. Godspeed to you.

Userlevel 7
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@bradley I wouldn’t wish it on you brother!

@dan_ahrens I also want to say thank you for all of these advisory sessions of late. It is much appreciated to be able to give real world input and feedback on such significant roadmap items before they are fully developed and released to help all of us achieve successes related to the platform.

Userlevel 7
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@bradley I wouldn’t wish it on you brother!

@dan_ahrens I also want to say thank you for all of these advisory sessions of late. It is much appreciated to be able to give real world input and feedback on such significant roadmap items before they are fully developed and released to help all of us achieve successes related to the platform.

@dan_ahrens Agreed. I sound salty most of the time but generally am very appreciative feedback is even requested in the first place. And that already launched features have (this) mechanism to ask for feedback and action it.

Userlevel 7
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@dan_ahrens I was so excited by the title I signed up for the first session before I read the description. :yum:

May I ask you to elaborate a little on what you mean when you say “focus more on Salesforce Contact or Account Contact Relation sync to Gainsight Person, Company Person or Relationship Person”?

 

Also :100: to what Bradley said.  SFDC to MDA 1st.  We are currently experiencing a problem where non-Latin based alpha characters (i.e. Japanese) are getting munged into weird computer symbols when syncing to Person/Company Person (via rules - we had to move away from connectors because we couldn’t filter the way we needed to).  We have a critical ticket open with support on that now.  But I had to disable a bunch of reverse syncing back to SFDC for the exact reason Bradley states above. 

The 3rd session will focus primarily on the sync of SFDC contact records with GS person records (and all of the different variations of contact and person types that need to sync). 

Userlevel 7
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I also want to mention that we’re having an issue with linked objects created in Gainsight CTAs and injecting a bunch of HTML into their SFDC counterpart. And I mean the actual back-end code, not the rendered output. This escapes the HMTL stripping in rules, and really needs to be resolved before bi-directional syncing happens. I don’t know if it’s just our org or more wide-spread but it’s a huge pain for our users.

The HTML will show up even if all you write is “Hello World.”, so we can’t just work around it by removing some bulleting and indentation.

Userlevel 7
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Something that popped up in today’s discussion, was needing the ability to grant write permissions for write-enabled fields based on user groups.

 

This would help mitigate adoption hesitation, especially with regard to convincing Salesforce teams it’s a good idea.

 

You may have fields you want to be able to update in Gainsight first, but you may not want everyone able to update them.

Userlevel 7
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@dan_ahrens , @Sai Ram , @Cornelia Where are we with this? Any update?

Userlevel 7
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Echoing @bradley  I’m also curious where we are with this.  We had the VCAM 6 months ago (March 24 to be exact) and, IIRC correctly, we were told that this was “coming soon” and that we’d have some follow up on the feedback we provided and the directional plans as a result. 

May you share any update @Swati Bakshi @dstokowski @pgeorge @minh_phan  @Cornelia ?

Userlevel 4
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@darkknight @bradley This is currently work in progress. We are working to release this enhancement early next year for the Salesforce connector. 

Once the release timelines are more clear, I will be posting updates in this thread.

Thank you

Preethi

Userlevel 3
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@pgeorge is there a release timeline yet for this 🙂 thanks!

Userlevel 7
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I’m also curious on a timeline on this. We need to have some kind of idea as we plan strategically for our NXT implementation/upgrade.

Userlevel 7
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@pgeorge @anirbandutta In the draft release notes for Feb 5 it says

 

Sync Salesforce Data in Real-time: Admins can now sync Salesforce Account, Contact, and Case data in real-time to Gainsight through Salesforce Connector.

 

Do we have an ETA on when we’ll be able to RT Sync in the reverse direction?

Userlevel 7
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Can we get an answer to @darkknight’s question? The term “real time bi-directional sync” implies that we would have a real-time sync from SFDC to GS AND from GS to SFDC, but it appears we only have SFDC to GS, so it’s not really bi-directional.

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