Unless otherwise mentioned, below are the standard matching rules.

Matching

Note that most of the time matching only occurs when you ‘pull’ data into the DataHub.

For example, if you have customer data in two systems and you want them to be matched, but you only want to synchronise data in one direction, you’ll still need to configure both items to ‘pull’.

Tax Codes:

• on identifier

Financial Accounts:

• on ledgerCode

Parties

• on email (must be enabled in the configuration)

Note that enabling this should be considered carefully. Unless all systems are under the control of the organisation, a concept called ”Data Spiking” can occur. Read below for a discussion on this.

Contact matching

If you want contacts to match up from the two systems, the only way to match is by pulling them both into Slyncy. You’ll need to configure this from the ‘advanced’ data flow configuration – by clicking the Right arrow (the arrow on the left side) next to the Parties configuration.

Inventory Items

• on catalogue id

Data Spiking

This can occur when the data source of one of the systems comes from an untrusted source. An untrusted source could be an eCommerce system (because users fill in their own user information). It could also come from another system which is synchronised somewhere, but not under your control (such as with another sync provider).

This can have serious repercussions for your data if not considered carefully. If the data comes from an external source it may end up in your accounting software. You may have some good controls on your accounting data information, but if you are syncing user generated information into your accounting system, then you cannot guarantee that the quality of that data, will remain the same; for example, it may be updated by a user at a later date. One cause of the problem may be that a user’s account has been hacked. This can lead to the data in your accounting system becoming affected. This may be acceptable to you, depending on your data requirements and there may be no other solution to this.

There is a ‘feature’ in Slyncy that can cause this problem to be much worse. If the ‘match by email address’ configuration is enabled then the following scenario could conceivably occur:

• You create an account in your accounting software for your very important customer bill@microsoft.com, for example.
• You are synchronising your eCommmerce system into your system and you enable the ‘match by email address’ configuration.
• A hacker (or even someone making an innocent mistake at microsoft) may buy something on your eCommerce system and put down bill@microsoft.com as their email address
• Since the ‘real’ Bill has never bought anything on the eCommerce system, the new eCommerce user will be linked into the same account as the ‘real’ Bill, and depending on how you configure Slyncy, Bill’s address may be changed to the hacker’s address.

In this case, the solution is to not use the ‘match by email address’ option. There are scenarios where this option is useful, but you must consider this when using the option. There is a notice on the option page of all relevant systems warning you about this problem.