BCM Sharing, Add-Ins and Synchronization

I've created the base for an Outlook add-in that allows me to maintain
additional information on a new region within a BCM Account. The thing
I'm trying to get past is the best way to store this data and some
problems related to that.

Let me say first that simply using custom fields is not feasible due to
the nature of the data I'm capturing. That is not negotiable.

The first idea I dismissed was the idea of building an XML document
containing all the data I need and attaching that to the Account. I
saw this method used in an Add-In example downloaded from Microsoft's
site. There are 2 problems with this. First, the attachment approach
didn't seem to work when using a shared database. Second, I need to be
able to efficiently report on the data collected though this custom
region. An attachment to an Outlook Item would not provide an
effective reporting repository.

The most reasonable idea, I think, is just to define custom tables in
the BCM database. This gets a little tricky because it would have to
write to either the shared database, or the offline database depending
on whether the user is offline or not. If writing to the offline
database, then the data must be synchronized at some point.

I can work through the synchronization algorithm if I need to, but I
have the following questions:

1. Is there some built-in feature of the BCM synch mechanism that can
synch custom data?

2. Is there some storage option for this custom data that I'm
completely missing?

3. If I need to write my own synch algorithm, is there some event that
I can subscribe to that will tell me when the standard OCM synch is
being performed so that I can piggy back on to that to perform my own?

.

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