Business Development Bank of Canada filters Microsoft Exchange content with Connecting Software´s custom solution built in just two months

Business Development Bank of Canada, a Crown corporation, provides businesses across Canada with the financing and advisory services they need to succeed. Serving Canadian entrepreneurs since 1944, BDC’s 2,500 employees support over 72,000 clients.

Filtering Microsoft Exchange synchronization to CRM

BDC Capital, one of the most active venture capital investors in Canada, needed to integrate its existing Microsoft Exchange ecosystem with a new CRM platform. To meet security and compliance requirements, BDC needed to limit what items stored on Exchange, such as email, contacts, and tasks, were exposed to the CRM platform before integration could occur.

BDC needed to meet several requirements to proceed. The solution had to provide a unidirectional synchronization from Exchange to the destination system. The filters needed to exclude communications considered internal. For security purposes, any email transmitted between Exchange and the CRM system had to be encrypted.

In short, BDC was looking for a robust solution to get filtered copies of Microsoft Exchange mailboxes without any user interaction. It needed to be fully automatic.

BDC engaged Connecting Software, a Microsoft gold partner with over 18 years of experience including an ISO/IEC 27001 certification for information security management. Yanick Martin, BDC’s senior project manager and solution architect, thought Connecting Software’s CB Exchange Server Sync could solve the challenge.

“It was a complex project,” Martin said. “Using CB Exchange Server Sync together with Microsoft Exchange Server was key.”

Customizing an existing solution to serve Canadian investment

“The original product did not provide all the capabilities we needed,” Martin said. “So, the team at Connecting Software worked with us to deliver a customized product.”

Connecting Software added significant modifications to CB Exchange Server Sync, turning it into an even more powerful solution with stronger capabilities to filter Exchange information.

“Without their flexibility to meet our needs on this CB Exchange component, the project would have stopped,” Martin said.

Over two months in 2020, the solution became a reality. The deployed system enables the creation of a second set of Exchange information that is synchronized with the original set but filtered according to rules. The CRM gets the necessary data from this second, filtered dataset.

BDC deployed Connecting Software’s solution on-premises. The new system allows BDC to restrict email based on domains or specific email addresses and provides the possibility to define filters based on inclusion or exclusion, applicable to a granular level. Filtering can apply to mailboxes, subfolders, specific fields, and attachments. The solution even provides the ability to remove attachments from synchronization.

CB Exchange Server Sync also filters calendars and features item-level restrictions on subject, status, category, attendee email, and more.

Understanding customer needs to accomplish innovation

“The project was a big achievement. In fact, we have been contacted by many other companies looking to understand how we accomplished this innovative task,” Martin said.

The good news for other organizations is that Connecting Software has integrated the solution it developed into an out-of-the-box product. The product supports Exchange from Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 through Exchange Online and Microsoft 365.

In the end, the BDC team was satisfied with the service it got from Connecting Software.

“Our favorite aspects of working with the team were that they could understand our needs and had a quick reaction to adapt their product to allow us to attain the business results we needed,” said Martin.