Salesforce to Salesforce (S2S)

Salesforce to Salesforce (S2S) is a very powerful feature to Integrate two or more Salesforce Orgs. Although the implementation sounds pretty straight forward but there are some facts Admin needs to know before they estimate and start the implementation. Below is the list of top 10 items you should be aware of before you plan to use this feature:

1. Salesforce to Salesforce is more of a framework and not an end to end solution to Integrate two Orgs. It provides the minimum basic functionality you need to Integrate the two Orgs. There are a number of limitations and restrictions which you need to go through which may impact your project.
2. All the record mappings between Orgs is maintained in an object called PartnerNetworkRecordConnection. It holds the source Org Id and target Org Id with different statuses, it’s important to understand the details around this object. This helps debugging the issues as well.
3. S2S does not handle record Deletion. It synchronizes record creation and updates but if a record is deleted in source Org, its not deleted in target Org. The workaround to this is to schedule an apex batch job to delete the records marked in PartnerNetworkRecordConnection object.
4. You may need to create process builders to map record types in two Orgs on the object. This should be added to your estimates and project plan.
5. As any other Integration, you may have to do an initial Data Load across Orgs. This cannot be done using any tool as doing so will not create the link that S2S maintains in PartnerNetworkRecordConnection, which may create a problem if any related records are created and synced post-implementation. This initial data push has to be done using S2S record forwarding functionality via Classic UI.
6. Be aware of GDPR and Privacy Laws, If connecting Orgs for different countries you may need to handle the data privacy rules for both the countries. It may be legal to maintain the Individual data in one country but not in another. This may need additional effort or prior planning.
7. Lightning UX does not support forwarding of records to target Org. Once S2S is set up, you can manually forward the records from the object list view from Classic but there is no such option available in lighting as of today. The workaround is to write apex triggers to auto-forward the records once they are created in source org i.e creating a new entry in PartnerNetworkRecordConnection object automatically. A solution needs to be developed if you need a way to stop sync as well.
8. One of the big pain points is that S2S does not synch a lookup field if there are multiple lookup relationship fields created on the same object i.e. if there are multiple Account lookups created on Opportunity, none of the Account lookup field on Opportunity will be synced. This can be done via customization.
9. Before making any change in the object metadata which is synced, Admin should inform that to the other org admin to make sure it won’t break any functionality.
10. Check the guidelines mentioned by Salesforce – here