Dynamics connector... nice but no worthy yet?

I first saw the Dynamics connector at Convergence of last year. I was at that time not very impressed and it seems still a lot of work had to be done for making it a solid solution.


I am currently working on new assignment and due to the requirement we have to implement Biztalk 2010 for integration purposes. So I am currently focusing on the heavy weight for integration.

Nevertheless, I also had to look to two integration based on the Dynamics connector and as you might expect they both failed. It was integration between CRM and ERP (Nav and AX). Most complaints I heard that its almost impossible to debug, I also experienced it myself. The error messages are so general that you keep searching untill.... The other complaint I heard that Microsoft support on the connector is bare minimum and seems not to get a lot of attention.

In both cases the solution tends to be to turn to non-free integration solution either of Scribe or even custom .NET solutions.

Of course, I am curious if this was just my bad luck or that more of you have bad experience with the free connector? I also read some post that people got it working, but it didn't say if it was just basic or more complex integration.

Keep it integrated! :)

Comments

WOW, thanks for the post. I have not had to use the connectors yet but it's only a matter of time. I will be interested if you get a response from Microsoft. Also I hope others will provided input that have attempted to use it.
Anonymous said…
I have had to use the connector recently and its ok if you set up the default connector but as soon as you try and add a custom entity it is extremely difficult.

The biggest problem I had using the connector was the lack of documentation and examples.

It's very frustrating to use
Anonymous said…
Must say that I got it up and running with AX, for about a month now. For AX I discovered that once there is an error, it's data related and the errormessage is in AX visible.
The log from the connector itself then only shows Object not set to an instance of an object.
The errors on CRM part are luckily crisp.
You can handle most of it, but it's no scribe (yet).
This week a new version should be released, according to connect.