AttendBeacon
Open the workspace

Guides for organisers

Sync event registrations to Dynamics 365 and Customer Insights - Journeys

Your sales and marketing teams work in Dynamics 365. Your event registrations should end up there too, without exports and copy and paste.

By Peter Ruiter 5 min read

Events produce data your CRM needs: who registered, who came, which sessions they attended, and which visitors your team met at a stand. In many teams, getting that into Dynamics 365 means a CSV export after the event and a day of cleaning up duplicates.

The AttendBeacon event platform works with Dynamics 365 and Customer Insights - Journeys. It keeps your environment in step while registrations come in. It connects through the Dataverse Web API, with an app registration you own. Dynamics 365 is a Microsoft product; AttendBeacon is an independent event platform.

What arrives in Dynamics 365

You choose what is written. The connection test reads your environment and offers only what it has.

  • Contacts and AttendBeacon activity. Each person becomes a contact, or is matched to an existing one. A note on the contact's timeline records each registration, cancellation, check-in and session attended. This mode uses standard tables only, so it works in any environment.
  • Event management tables. If your environment has the event management tables of Customer Insights - Journeys, the event, its sessions, registrations and check-ins are written there. Segments and journeys can then use them as their own. A cancelled ticket makes its registration inactive.
  • Real-time journeys triggers. If you have created custom triggers in Customer Insights - Journeys, each signal can fire one: registered, cancelled, checked in, or lead captured. Your marketers can start journeys from them. A cancellation ends only that ticket's journey.
  • Leads. Visitors who agreed to share their details with a sponsor can arrive as Dynamics leads, for the sponsors you choose per event. Each lead is created once, with its rating and the lead source Trade Show. After that, it belongs to your sales team. Later changes on the event side never overwrite their work.

How it avoids duplicates

Duplicates are the main reason event data is not trusted in a CRM. The connection is careful about them:

  • Contacts are matched by email address, across all three email columns.
  • New contacts go through your own duplicate detection rules. A duplicate is reported, for a person to merge.
  • An inactive match is not duplicated. You are asked to reactivate or merge it.
  • Values you already hold are kept, unless you choose to replace them in the mapping. Columns are never emptied.
  • A company links to the account of exactly that name, when there is exactly one. Accounts are never created.

Before you connect

Your Dynamics 365 administrator does a few things once. The workspace shows the same steps under How to connect.

  1. Register an app in the Microsoft Entra admin center. Choose this organisational directory only, with no redirect URI. Copy the application (client) ID and the directory (tenant) ID.
  2. Give it a credential. A certificate is recommended; a client secret works too. Note when it expires.
  3. Make a security role in the environment, in the Power Platform admin center. It needs the privileges listed in the workspace: contacts, accounts and notes, plus leads and campaigns, the event management tables and read access to triggers, depending on what you sync.
  4. Create an application user for the app, in the root business unit, with that role. It needs no licence.
  5. Optional: create custom triggers in Customer Insights - Journeys and finish them until they are Ready to use.
  6. Copy the environment URL, such as https://contoso.crm4.dynamics.com.

The app registration needs no API permission. There is no solution to import and no change to your tables.

Connect

In the workspace, open Integrations and choose Dynamics 365. The wizard has six steps.

  1. Environment: the URL, the tenant, the client and the credential.
  2. Test: shows which modes your environment supports.
  3. What syncs: contacts and activity, event management tables, triggers and leads.
  4. Mapping: which value goes where, and whether a value already in Dynamics may be replaced.
  5. Events: new events sync by default. Pick which existing events to include. What happened before you connected is sent only when you ask for it with "Send everything now".
  6. Consent: see the next section.

You are the controller of your attendees' data, and the event platform processes it for you. Sending registrations to your own CRM, for running the event, is your decision, and your privacy notice must say so. Nothing syncs until an administrator confirms that it does.

You can go further and require a consent question per event. Without a tick, a person is not sent. Crew tickets and unnamed team seats are never sent.

Marketing permission is a separate matter. That is the job of the consent settings in Customer Insights - Journeys. The event platform does not record marketing consent in Dynamics, though you can map a consent answer to a column of your choice.

Leads are the sponsor's. They reach your CRM only for the sponsors you choose, only while the visitor still shares their details, and nothing more is sent after they stop.

While it runs

Changes go out as they happen. A sweep every 30 seconds catches anything else, such as a name corrected at the desk. If Dynamics asks it to slow down, the connection waits as long as Dynamics says.

A record that fails is tried again up to eight times over about a day. After that, it is shown with the CRM's own error and a Retry button. Each attendee shows their CRM status in the workspace, with "Sync again".

The credentials are kept in a key vault, never in the database. Disconnecting stops the sync at once and deletes the credentials.

Test before your event

Connect a test or sandbox environment first. Then:

  1. Register two or three test attendees, and cancel one.
  2. Check one in at the door, and scan a lead at a test stand.
  3. Open each record in Dynamics 365 and check what arrived and where.
  4. Fire a trigger, if you use them, and watch the journey start.
  5. Delete the test records.

Leads the event platform creates say so in their description, and its timeline notes end with "Created by AttendBeacon". Contacts it created carry those notes. That makes them easy to find and remove.

Other CRMs

The same approach works for Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive and Zoho CRM. See all integrations.

All guides