SharePoint Use Cases

Last week, in the part 1, I wrote about possible integration scenarios for SharePoint and CRM. In this post I am going to explain which products you can use to integrate the two.

Integration option 1. – For customers without SharePoint Enterprise

Microsoft released List Web Part for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 which you can use to integrate SharePoint with CRM in case you do not have SharePoint Enterprise.

How to use it:

• You can use this web part to list some data from CRM on a SharePoint page.
• Since SharePoint web part pages are very flexible, you can use these to create some custom dashboard pages to display important data on a single page.

This web part is very easy to deploy but in a complex environment you will need to do some planning before installation, check  List Web Part for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Deployment Scenarios for more information.

Integration option 2. – For customers with SharePoint Enterprise

As one of the Accelerators for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Microsoft provides you with Enterprise Search accelerator. It is a very simple and effective solution allowing you to integrate CRM and SharePoint via Business Data Catalog.

Accelerator is basically a BDC definition file, so you can easily customize it to suite your needs in case you have a customized CRM system.

This accelerator will allow you to:

• Add custom business data columns to your lists and libraries
• View and edit CRM data from SharePoint
• Search CRM entities using a familiar SharePoint search interface