Sharepoint Integration Approaches

Sharepoint is one of those things that is under appreciated for its capabilities and usefulness. Sharepoint is:

• an intranet site
• an extranet site
• a document store
• a team working site
• a replacement for shared drives
• a central point to access all systems
• managing business processes
• what we use to manage CRM projects
• many other things – see Applications for Sharepoint

There are several different ways Sharepoint and Microsoft CRM can interact including:

• Using a Sharepoint page as a Dashboard replacement for the CRM Homepage
• Using a Sharepoint Document Library for holding CRM documents
• Creating a Sharepoint Sub Site for each CRM record
• Displaying CRM data in Sharepoint Lists
• Displaying CRM Reports in Sharepoint using SQL Reporting Services web parts
• Displaying Microsoft CRM data in custom Sharepoint web parts
• Use Microsoft Office web parts to display Microsoft CRM data in Sharepoint
• Use Business Scorecard Manager to create KPIs on CRM data and display in Sharepoint

We are seeing a great deal of interest in SharePoint alongside CRM 3.0 and thus knowing and understanding SharePoint and its SDK are another skill set required by a CRM Developer. I will be blogging more on SharePoint integration going deeper into the methods listed above.