We are brainstorming with a client and are interested if something is possible and if so, what would be a ballpark cost to develop.

A national organization has 10+ affiliate organizations.

Each of the affiliate organizations would like to have has it own highly customized instance of sfdc as they are involved in many different projects and programs and have only one major operation in common.

What we would like to accomplish is to sync certain objects between the “main” database and each of the “affiliate” databases.  Objects such as account and opportunity would have a “marker” (i.e.  a “sync with national”  checkbox”) to indicate which records would sync.  Not all fields on these objects would need to be synced.  Any open or closed Activities that were “Related To” these objects would also need to be synced.

This may sound like the Enterprise version with some complex sharing and/or territory or divisions, BUT it is not for several reasons:

1. Many of the affiliates want their own administrators but they do not want share ALL between the individual affiliates and the National office.
2. 80% of what some of the affiliates do is completely unique to their organization and they don’t want to limit how they use their instance
3. Each affiliate would like to maintain the ability to develop their instance of sfdc to best meet there own needs (assuming they maintain the 20 to 50 fields that need to be globally shared).
4. AND other political reasons.

QUESTIONS:

Could this be done with a client supplied hardware “synchronization server” (maybe SQL) that has ALL the common data for all sites and interfaces with all the sfdc instances?

I’m open to looking at any solution.  I’m just guessing the budget would be $5 to $10K.

Any ideas?

Please respond to:

John@hss2grow.com

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