Synchronize Data between SharePoint Lists and External Data Sources

We are no longer actively selling the Lightning Data Masher. Existing customers will be fully supported. If you have any questions please email support@lightningtools.com

SharePoint Business Connectivity External Lists provide a great way of reading and writing data back to a external data source. However, External Lists are not without limitation. Since the data does not actually reside within the SharePoint List, you cannot create workflows, add additional SharePoint  columns, apply item level permissions, or build datasheet views. Therefore Lightning Tools provide a Data Masher tool which will create a custom SharePoint list and import the data rather than link to it. Data is then synchronized using a Timer Job back to the external data source.

Get SharePoint Data Out

Allowing your users to enter data into SharePoint Lists brings huge benefits to your organization:

1. Users are familiar with the SharePoint List user interface
2. Native SharePoint functionality such as workflows and alerts can be used
3. SharePoint remains the central hub for daily work.

Once data has been entered into your SharePoint Lists however you may need to get it into a database for reporting or other processing requirements. The Lightning Data Masher allows you to configure timer jobs to export your SharePoint List Items to external systems.

Bring Database Data In

Businesses hold their data in all kinds of different systems. The Lightning Data Masher can bring this data into SharePoint Lists to allow your users to re-use it in their day to day activities. Importing your external data into SharePoint Lists bring the following benefits:

1. You can reuse the data in SharePoint
2. SharePoint workflows can be configured around changes to your business data
3. Use standard SharePoint Web Parts to display your business data

Move SharePoint Data Around

Implementing best practices for SharePoint and creating many Site Collections does create issues when you want to re-use SharePoint List Data in many different places. The Lightning Data Masher now makes this easy as jobs can be setup to allow data to be moved around within SharePoint so you can have a master central list, and child lists that contain the same data. As soon as something changes in the master list it can be replicated out to the others.