HubSpot Dynamics 365 Custom Lookup Sync

Joshua Oakes took this one from the client-project side. He said he has not had to deal with Dynamics in about five years, but that owner fields are “easily the number one” lookup that syncs between the two systems and gives you a headache. His example was an assigned owner, either the record owner or a secondary user property, that had to land on a related or downstream object in Dynamics. The lists of users matched, but he said HubSpot's owner property behaves like an array, with an ID, an email and a name (he flagged that he was not sure that is technically accurate), and “Lord knows how it works in Dynamics.” So the team had to write the ID out, run a match that pulls the ID and writes it to the other side, and then someone changed teams and a Dynamics shop had to maintain the whole thing constantly. He called the sync a long time coming and a big boon for the orgs unlucky enough to have Dynamics at the core.

He also drew the line on timing. Joshua said the sync is live and “That's not beta, so you can go ahead and do it any time.” But for an organization with Dynamics at the core and HubSpot in marketing, he pointed to the real clock: “I look forward to the eight months from now when this makes your life easier to get this all rolled out. There's a lot of code to unwind and resolve.” The eight months is Joshua's estimate on air, not a HubSpot figure.

Chris Carolan, who read the update, added why this kind of sync is hard. HubSpot was built around the contact record and only got users as an object in the last year or two, and questions like whether your owner field relates to them are all newer. “Microsoft has always been built around that user record.” So when you connect it to the systems built for customers, Chris said, you run into this very quickly and it is not easy to unravel. On the update itself, Chris pointed back to the panel: no automatic changes, and no action required if you don't use these properties. He added that this covers custom lookup sync properties in general, not only the SDR and CSM examples: “I imagine you might have some other use cases besides owner.”