Summary

In this chapter, we talked about the practicalities of developing, deploying, and maintaining an integration.

We looked at the project from the point of view of a project manager, and discussed the techniques of creating a project team, dividing out the effort into work areas, creating user stories, estimating, developing, and testing.

We then talked about deployment of the completed integration feature, by installing the software on the live server, and then training up users in groups, and working with them until they are using the new feature independently.

Finally, we discussed ongoing maintenance of the integration to keep it running smoothly over time. We discussed defect resolution, the need to retest after every upgrade of CRM and ERP application software, data maintenance, backups and tuning, and planning for new integration feature development.

In the next and final chapter, we wrap up by speculating about future developments in CRM to ERP integrations.