In the world of CRM and Project Management (PM) software, providing seamless connectivity to user data—especially email and calendar—is non-negotiable.
Many platform builders look at the integration challenge and think:
“We’ll just use a unified API to handle the OAuth and connections.”
“Or we’ll build it ourselves; the Gmail and Microsoft Graph APIs are well-documented.”
While that initial connection step might be easy, this approach misses a critical reality: connecting to an API is 10% of the work. Building enterprise-grade sync logic is the other 90%.
Unified APIs don’t eliminate the hardest part: the sync logic itself.
Email: The Illusion of Easy Connectivity
Most developers can connect to Gmail and Microsoft Graph APIs in a few days. But the real challenge begins after authentication.
The major development drain isn’t the API handshake—it’s the edge cases and user expectations that define a reliable CRM integration:
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Protocols Beyond OAuth
What about users on Hosted Exchange or IMAP servers? Supporting these requires entirely different protocol handling, often months of extra development. -
The Global Threading Challenge
A CRM must track a single conversation across multiple inboxes and link it to one record. This requires sophisticated thread discovery logic. -
Deduplication and Caching
You don’t want to log the same email twice. Handling deduplication, caching unmatched emails, and scaling to millions of records is a constant battle.
Calendar Sync: The Abyss of Recurrence Rules
If email is tricky, bi-directional calendar syncing is the real monster.
On the surface, the goal is simple: a meeting created in Google Calendar should appear correctly in your CRM, and vice versa. In reality, it’s a swamp of nuanced requirements:
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Recurring Events
Daily, weekly, monthly recurrence rules—plus overrides and exceptions—can take a year or more to build properly. -
Meeting Deduplication (Multi-User Sync)
When multiple users in the same organization are syncing, the same meeting invitation is often received from several individual inboxes. The sync logic must intelligently deduplicate these signals and sync the event to the CRM only once as a single, centralized group event. -
Conflict Resolution If a meeting is updated in both the CRM and the external calendar (like Outlook or Gmail) around the same time, the sync logic must reconcile these concurrent updates to determine the final, correct state without causing sync loops or overriding critical data.
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Group and Child Events
Handling complex group events requires creating and updating meetings while accurately respecting all attendees and their individual responses. This often involves navigating intricate data models (like parent and child events common in CRM platforms) to maintain data integrity across systems.
Task Sync: The Hidden Complexity for PM Platforms
While not as universally used as calendar sync, task integration is mission-critical for project management and productivity platforms. Unfortunately, support for task entities in most unified APIs is rare, forcing developers to start from scratch.
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Similarity Analysis and Duplication Prevention The same tasks are often entered across systems. The system needs similarity logic to link the same tasks across accounts to prevent duplicates from flooding the user’s view.
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Conflict Resolution When a task is marked as “Completed” in Outlook and simultaneously edited for description in the PM platform, the sync engine must reconcile both updates correctly and prevent one action from overwriting the other.
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Unified API Blind Spot Unlike email and calendar, most unified APIs do not support task entities for core providers like Gmail (Tasks) and Outlook (To Do). This immediately forces developers to build and maintain custom API connections for these foundational integrations, creating a steep and unavoidable integration curve.
Contact Sync: A Minefield, Not a Flat Field
Contact sync seems like a simple field-to-field mapping. In practice, it’s anything but. User data is always messy, incomplete, and overlapping.
To deliver quality, platforms must handle:
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Similarity Analysis
How do you avoid duplicates between “John Smith” and “Jon Smith” with different phone numbers? -
Merging and Conflict Resolution
When multiple users sync the same contact with slight variations, you need logic to merge intelligently—without losing critical info or creating sync loops. -
Rich Data Sync
Even contact photos add surprising overhead.
The Expanding Ecosystem
The hidden long-term cost? Scope creep.
Today, you may only need Google and Microsoft. Tomorrow, your customers will demand integrations with HubSpot, Constant Contact, Creatio, and beyond.
Once you build a custom sync engine, you also inherit a lifetime of maintenance, debugging, and updates across every system.
The Solution: Focus on Your Product, Not the Plumbing
If your platform relies on high-quality, complex data integration, investing millions in custom sync logic is a high-risk, low-reward path.
That’s where BrightSync (powered by Aurinko) comes in.
With BrightSync, you get hardened, production-ready sync logic out of the box:
- Handles recurring events and edge cases in calendar sync
- Tracks global email threads without duplicates
- Merges contact duplicates intelligently
- Expands seamlessly to new providers
👉 Let us handle the 90% complexity so your team can focus on the 10% that actually differentiates your product.
BrightSync is built for CRM-like and PM-like platforms that want to ship world-class integrations without the hidden cost of endless sync development.