Patent ID: 8533258

Claim:
A method executed on a computing device for bi-directionally synchronizing items between an email, contact management, scheduling (ECS) application and a customer relationship management (CRM) application, the method comprising: detecting a change to an item maintained by the ECS application at a CRM module integrated to the ECS application; updating one or more tables in an ECS client cache with records associated with the detected change; processing the records in the one or more tables; submitting the change to the CRM application; calling on the CRM application to retrieve changes to items maintained by the CRM application; retrieving at least one change to an item maintained by the CRM application; updating the item maintained by the ECS application corresponding to the changed item maintained by the CRM application; and in response to a failure to update the CRM application, re-attempting to update the CRM application by retrieving the detected change through another scan of the one or more tables in the ECS client cache and submitting the detected change to the CRM application.