UNDERSTANDING TIER1 CALENDAR SYNC
Tier1 Calendar Sync provides an automatic service to manage meetings and invitations directly from Tier1 Events.
Events and meetings created by coordinators in Tier1 Events are also created in Exchange or Exchange Online.
Invited contacts will receive their meeting invitations through email via your Exchange.
Any responses or replies from contacts are then recorded back into Tier1 Events.
ARCHITECTURE
Tier1 Calendar Sync is a separate server environment running on the Tier1 Harmony Integration Engine connected to both Salesforce and Microsoft Exchange, as illustrated below.
The major architectural elements that make up Tier1 Calendar Sync are:
A managed package, EventExchangeSync that is installed on the Salesforce org. This package contains the Apex code and configuration that integrates with Tier1 Events and processes meeting creation, updates and attendee invitation management. It also handles the translation of invitation responses from invitees back to Tier1 Events as attendance status.
The Tier1 Harmony Integration Engine, which is the underlying platform on which the server-side processing of the Calendar Sync operations are executed, is a highly-available and transactional (lossless) message processor on which the calendar sync business logic runs. The engine runs in Jakarta EE environments for deployment and management and in production environments would have multiple instances to support disaster recovery and failover. The engine also supports extensions for using external secrets management services, normally used for authentication details.
A set of plugins which handle the communications with the Exchange instance. These plugins manage the Exchange meeting instances that correspond to the Tier1 Events meetings. The plugins also generate client invitations to said meetings and process the email responses from clients to the invitations.
A Microsoft Exchange server instance, which can either be an Exchange Online instance or a customer managed/on-premise instance. The plugins communicate to an O365 instance using Microsoft Graph and to on-premise instances using Exchange Web Services.
One or more Exchange mailboxes, referred to as the coordinator mailboxes, that hold the meetings, send out invitations and receive client responses. These are internal and only accessed by the calendar sync processes.
Clients that are invited as meeting attendees receive and reply to the meetings through their own email infrastructure.