Improving the sales rep productivity by using the Microsoft Exchange sync technology in Pega Sales Automation
Improving the sales rep productivity by using the Microsoft Exchange sync technology in Pega Sales Automation
Synchronizing Pega Sales Automation with Microsoft Exchange
Synchronizing Pega Sales Automation with Microsoft Exchange helps to maximize your selling time and keep your inbox up to date. Your emails, appointments, and contacts are synced to Pega Sales Automation, and the emails, appointments, and contacts created in Pega Sales Automation are synchronized back to Microsoft Exchange. With this synchronization, you can track all of your activities and analyze the incoming data. You can also analyze the sentiment of received emails, appointments, and corresponding attachments. Based on that analysis, the system can suggest appropriate actions. You can access all your Microsoft-related data without leaving Pega Sales Automation.
Pega Sales Automation provides bi-directional synchronization capabilities for the following objects:
- Calendar synchronization
- Email synchronization
- Contact synchronization
Authentication Mechanisms
To integrate Pega Sales Automation with Microsoft Exchange for any object, you must perform authentication. You can choose from the following authentication options:
- Basic authentication
- OAuth 2.0 authentication (recommended)
Basic authentication
For basic authentication, you must create an impersonation account on Microsoft Exchange with impersonation privileges.
With the Microsoft Exchange impersonation, one account acts as another account. For an impersonated account, the system logs the access as if the impersonated account was acting on the system. Impersonation enables a caller, such as a service application, to impersonate a user account. The caller can perform operations by using the permissions that are associated with the impersonated account, instead of the permissions associated with the caller's account.
Your Microsoft Exchange administrator must configure the Microsoft Exchange impersonation account for your Pega Sales Automation implementation and provide you with the username and password, so that you can update the security profile in the application.
OAuth 2.0 authentication (recommended)
OAuth authentication is managed by a third-party provider. Your application does not have to collect and store Microsoft Exchange credentials. Your application receives an opaque token from the authentication provider, therefore, a security breach in your application can only expose the token, not the user's Exchange credentials.
For the OAuth 2.0 authentication, you must create an application in the Microsoft Azure portal, generate the client secret number, and configure the API permissions. For more information, see the Microsoft Azure documentation.
NOTE: OAuth authentication for Exchange Web Services (EWS) is available only in Microsoft Exchange as part of Microsoft Office 365.
The authentication method that you choose depends on the security requirements of your organization, whether you are using Exchange Online or Exchange on-premises, and whether you have access to a third-party provider that can issue OAuth tokens.
For more information about which authentication mechanism to choose, see the Microsoft article on Authentication and EWS in Exchange. For more information about configuring authentication mechanisms, see the Pega Community article on Configuring authentication mechanisms.
The following figure shows an example configuration for OAuth authentication:
Calendar synchronization
As a part of calendar synchronization, Pega Sales Automation provides the following bi-directional synchronization capabilities:
- Synchronize appointments in Pega Sales Automation to Microsoft Exchange
- Synchronize appointments in Microsoft Exchange to Pega Sales Automation.
Synchronize appointments in Pega Sales Automaton to Microsoft Exchange
Whenever you create, update, or cancel an appointment in Pega Sales Automation, the system immediately creates, updates, or cancels a corresponding appointment in Microsoft Exchange.
For more information, see the Pega Community article on Configuring Pega Sales Automation to Microsoft Exchange calendar integration.
Synchronizing appointments in Microsoft Exchange to Pega Sales Automation
When you create, update, or cancel an appointment in Microsoft Outlook, the system immediately transfers these events to Pega Sales Automation. Pega Sales Automation then creates, updates, or cancels the corresponding appointment.
There are two ways to synchronize appointments from Microsoft Exchange to Pega Sales Automation:
Push mechanism (recommended) – The push mechanism listens for Exchange Web Services (EWS) notifications to identify new, updated, and deleted contacts on the Microsoft Exchange server, and then synchronizes the contacts with your Pega Sales automation contact.
For more information about configuring the push mechanism, see the Pega Community article on Configuring the push mechanism for Microsoft Exchange to Pega Sales Automation.
Polling mechanism – The polling mechanism checks for new, updated, and canceled appointments on the Microsoft Exchange server and then synchronizes the appointments with your Pega Sales Automation calendar. Use the polling method only if the push mechanism is not available for your implementation.
For more information about configuring polling mechanism, see the Pega Community article on Configuring the polling mechanism for Microsoft Exchange to Pega Sales Automation.
The following figure shows an example App Studio setting for calendar integration:
Limitations
The following calendar integration functionalities are not supported when using Pega Sales Automation:
- Synchronizing recurring appointments from Microsoft Exchange to Pega Sales Automation
- Synchronizing private appointments from Microsoft Exchange to Pega Sales Automation.
Email synchronization
Microsoft Exchange to Pega Sales Automation email integration is a background process. The push mechanism for email integration listens for Exchange Web Services (EWS) notifications to identify new and updated emails on the Microsoft Exchange server, and then synchronizes the emails with your Pega Sales Automation email.
As a part of Email Synchronization, Pega Sales Automation provides bi-directional synchronization capabilities:
- Synchronize emails in Pega Sales Automaton to Microsoft Exchange
- Synchronize emails in Microsoft Exchange to Pega Sales Automation.
Synchronize emails in Pega Sales Automaton to Microsoft Exchange
When you create an email, reply to an email, or reply all to an email, Pega Sales Automation immediately creates a corresponding email in Microsoft Exchange.
For more information, see the Pega Community article on Configuring Pega Sales Automation to Microsoft Exchange email integration.
Synchronize emails in Microsoft Exchange to Pega Sales Automation
When you create, reply, or reply all to an email sent from Microsoft Outlook, the corresponding events are transferred to Pega Sales Automation, which creates corresponding email. To synchronize emails, Pega Sales Automation provides only a push mechanism. For more information about configuring email sync, see the Pega Community article on Synchronizing Microsoft Exchange email with Pega Sales Automation email.
Because emails should be synchronized within the Pega Sales Automation context, all emails should be associated with either a contact (or) organization (or) lead.
The following figure shows an example of App Studio settings for Email synchronization:
Limitations
The following are feature limitations:
- By default, synchronizing private emails with Pega Sales Automation is disabled.
- Draft emails cannot be synchronized.
Contact synchronization
Use contact synchronization to keep your contacts in sync between Microsoft Exchange and Pega Sales Automation, therefore improving your productivity and eliminating redundancy. In the process of configuring contact sync, multiple users are involved: system administrators, sales ops, and sales reps.
As part of contact synchronization, Pega Sales Automation provides the following bi-directional synchronization capabilities:
- Synchronize contacts in Pega Sales Automaton to Microsoft Exchange.
- Synchronize contacts in Microsoft Exchange to Pega Sales Automation.
Synchronizing contacts in Pega Sales Automation to Microsoft Exchange
With this integration, you can synchronize contacts in real time with your Microsoft Exchange server. To configure contact synchronization from Pega Sales Automation to Microsoft Exchange, see the Pega Community article on Synchronizing Pega Sales Automation contacts with Microsoft Exchange contacts.
Synchronizing contacts in Microsoft Exchange to Pega Sales Automation
When you create, update, or delete a contact in Microsoft Outlook, these events are immediately transferred to Pega Sales Automation, which then creates, updates, or closes the corresponding contact.
To synchronize contacts from Microsoft to Pega Sales Automation you can use only the push mechanism. For more information about how to configure contact sync, see the Pega Community article on Synchronizing Microsoft Exchange contacts with Pega Sales Automation contacts.
The following figure shows an example of App Studio settings for Contact synchronization:
Limitations
The following are feature limitations:
- By default, synchronizing private contacts with Pega Sales Automation is disabled. To synchronize private contacts, you must provide an extension.
- Contact categories are required to synchronize Microsoft Outlook contacts with Pega Sales Automation. Adding categories is not available in the Microsoft Outlook Web App. To synchronize contacts, add filters to specific contacts from the Microsoft Outlook client.
- Contact photos are not synchronized with Pega Sales Automation.
General recommendations for synchronization activities
The following are the main recommendations for all synchronization capabilities:
- Based on your customer’s business needs, in App Studio, you must configure a setting for the number of past days that you want to sync.
- In App Studio, it is recommended to set the batch size range to
1-512. - Notification frequency – In App Studio, enter the number of minutes to use as the maximum timeout value before canceling the synchronization and sending the email synchronization failure email notification. The application retries the synchronization until the timeout limit is reached. For optimal performance, enter
30in the Notification frequency field. - For cloud configuration requirements, see the Pega Community article on Cloud configuration requirements for Pega Sales Automation calendar synchronization with Microsoft Exchange.
Summary
Pega Sales Automation provides different synchronization capabilities for emails, appointments, and contacts. Based on customer needs, synchronization can be enabled for corresponding objects and operators.