Integrating SharePoint and Dynamics CRM

Dynamics CRM and SharePoint: Better Together
Dynamics CRM and SharePoint have plenty of similarities and just as many differences. While there is some overlap in the kinds of business applications each one is good for, there usually is a right answer to a question like “As an application platform for application X, would I be better off using SharePoint or Dynamics CRM?”.  
But for organizations who have both products, it’s not an either-or decision. In this situation there are lots of ways to integrate the two products, and you can take a “best tool for the job” approach.  
 
There are lots of different ways you can integrate the two platforms, and first off, it’s not like I think business people go around thinking to themselves…hmmm, how can I integrate SharePoint and CRM today? While we’d like to think that integrations always happen as part of a well thought out strategy, that might not always be the case.
 
In my experience, Dynamics CRM deployments tend to be well planned and somewhat “by the book”, whereas SharePoint ones often are more ad-hoc and can take on a life of their own. This is partly due to the nature of the data typically managed in each: CRM is essentially a platform for relational database applications with lots of rows and columns of highly formatted data. SharePoint stores all kinds of diverse content in lists and libraries, and there’s no built-in mechanism in SharePoint to create dbms-style relationships between those lists and libraries.
 
So here’s a common scenario where you might want to integrate the two: most organizations that have both products will probably have data in SharePoint that have to do with — or describe — data in CRM. You might have many documents in SharePoint that have to do with an Account record in CRM. You might have images stored in SharePoint image libraries that are about employee or product records in CRM. There are lots of examples like this, where the SharePoint data are really meta-data, since they’re data that describe the formatted data in CRM. These are good examples of what I think of as the right-tool-for-the-job. CRM’s doing what it’s good at and so is SharePoint.
 
If you understand how to use the IFRAME control on Dynamics CRM forms you can weave the SharePoint meta-data into the fabric of your structured applications in CRM. It takes just a little bit of code, but it’s fairly straightforward.
Here’s a video I made on the topic: Integrating SharePoint and Dynamics CRM  — let me know what you think!

December 20, 2008 · Filed under Integration and SharePoint

2 Comments »

  1. Shannon Navin Said,

    October 26, 2010 @ 8:58 am

    Hi…I’m noticing that several of the links to your videos aren’t working. I’ve heard such great things about your content that I was hoping to be able to access them. Is there a new url?

    Thanks!
    Shannon

  2. Richard Knudson Said,

    October 26, 2010 @ 9:45 am

    Hi Shannon,

    Uh-oh…I’ve been transitioning lately: jobs, web sites, content…and apparently my link transitions aren’t keeping up! :-) thanks for the reminder. It’s going to be a manual process going back through the archives and fixing links, but in the meantime, here’s something that will work for many of the broken ones:

    If you ever see a broken link that starts with “http://www.imginc.net”, you can replace it with “http://crm.magenium.com”, and leave everything else the same and it should find the video. That fix doesn’t work unfortunately for the example you tried (the sharepoint/crm video is an older link to content on http://www.imginc.com) I’ll see if I can find that video and re-post it…but just wait til you see how it works in CRM 2011!

    Thanks for reading — Richard

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