How do I sync many Accounts/Contact/Leads at once with the Salesforce integration?

Question

The legacy Salesforce integration included a bulk-sync function. How can I do something similar using the new Salesforce integration?

Answer 

As described in the article Configuring Data Sync from Salesforce to Zendesk: 

A data sync is triggered when a mapped field is updated in an existing Salesforce record, or a new record is created. Any unmapped fields that are updated do not trigger the sync.

The legacy integration did not fire when records were created or updated either in bulk or using the Salesforce API. This meant that a bulk-sync was sometimes required to update Zendesk for any records created/updated in this fashion.

The new Salesforce integration does not have this limitation. Bulk updates/API updates trigger a sync over to Zendesk, provided one of the mapped fields is changed. The following workflow outlines how to accomplish a bulk-sync-like function by updating many records in SFDC via the API.

Note: Syncing and the following workflow makes use of the Salesforce streaming API. As such, it is subject to their rate-limits for different plan-levels. The most relevant limit will likely be the following: Maximum number of delivered event notifications within a 24-hour period, shared by all CometD clients. Exceeding this limit will cause the sync to be deactivated.

For information on how to check your current rate-limit usage, see How can I check my Streaming API limits and usage?.

Although the following example deals specifically with account-syncing, a similar method can sync Contacts or Leads. While this explanation includes the creation of a new custom field within Salesforce, a checkbox field is not required for this method. The only requirement is that a non-formula field is present in SFDC and mapped within Admin Center which can be modified in bulk to trigger the streaming API event on which the sync is based.

Here are steps to sync many records quickly using two built-in SFDC tools:

1. Create a custom checkbox organization field in Zendesk called Sync with Salesforce.
   
2. Create a checkbox account field in Salesforce called Sync with Zendesk​ with a default value of False.
   
3. Map the two fields to each other in the Admin Center: 
   https://SUBDOMAIN.zendesk.com/admin/platform/integrations/salesforce/accounts_organizations 
   
4. Create a report in SFDC that includes two pieces of information:
   
   • SFDC account ID
   • The Sync with Zendesk account-field from step 2
     
5. Export the detail rows of the report from step 4 as a CSV.
   
   
6. In the spreadsheet editor of your choice, update the Sync with Zendesk column of the CSV file to be True.
7. Import the updated CSV back into SFDC (using a tool such as Dataloader) to update all of the accounts.
   
   
   
   
   
   (be sure you use the BATCH API and not the Bulk API for this Upsert/Update)
   
    
8. After updating the SFDC records, allow some time to ensure that the background jobs have time to complete. This timeframe varies depending on the number of records to be synced. For a few hundred records, this might only take a few minutes. For tens of thousands of records, it might take thirty minutes to an hour.
9. Once all of your records synced, remove the mapping from step 3 and delete the fields created in steps 1 and 2. Alternately, you can leave them in place for later in case you need to manually trigger a sync in the future.

Note: These steps describe the import process using Dataloader. Other Salesforce import tools can also work with the Zendesk integration. However, they must use the Batch API and not Bulk API for the import.