Building a SCpbMD Data Exchange Services Role

The Data Exchange Framework provides the ability to define the needed steps to extract and transform catalog data from one system to another, such as from Dynamics AX to Commerce Server Catalog database.

This service can live within Sitecore and run as a job, or it can run outside of Sitecore as a Windows Service or Console app. If the service runs outside of Sitecore, then it uses the Sitecore Web Item API to communicate with Sitecore to retrieve data exchange settings. If you are running the Data Exchange service outside of Sitecore, then you will still need to install the Data Exchange package on one of your CM servers so that the required item templates are created in Sitecore, and can be published to production.

In larger environments, with larger or more frequent synchronization needs, you may want to separate the Data Exchange service from the Sitecore installation to reduce the impact of synchronization on the Sitecore authoring environment. Depending on performance needs, this service can be deployed on the same machine as the Commerce Server Staging Service, or on a separate independent machine. The Data Exchange Service can temporarily consume large amounts of memory as it gathers the extraction from Dynamics and generates the extraction file, so you will need to ensure that the machine it is running on has adequate memory for the task.

In smaller environments, you can run the Data Exchange service to run inside of Sitecore as a Sitecore task to reduce the need for another machine.