Dynamics CRM Perspective

SharePoint integration adds document management functionality
to Dynamics CRM 2011. In CRM 4 the ability to manage documents
was limited to adding attachments (via ‘Notes’) to an entity. Since
SharePoint already provides rich document management features
like versioning and check in/out, it makes sense that Microsoft
would provide this integration. Even better though is the CRM
2011 List Component for SharePoint is a free download.

We will walk through the process of configuring this new
integration point. It only takes a few minutes to setup. We will
cover two scenarios:

1) Auto creation of SharePoint document folders
2) Linking CRM records to existing SharePoint folders 

The prerequisites to get this working: administrative access to
both CRM and the SharePoint site where you wish to store the
documents. Install the List Component  before configuring CRM.

Dynamics CRM 2011 supports SharePoint 2010 or 2007, but the
List Component only works with SharePoint 2010 and is what
facilitates the automatic creation of SharePoint folders.

1) Go into the Settings area and click on “Document Management“
in the left navigation pane.

2) Click on the “Document Management settings” link.

3) Select the entities for which you want to enable document
management:

4) Enter the SharePoint URL where you have installed the
SharePoint List Component

5) The ‘Based on entity’ option creates a folder hierarchy, under
either an Account or Contact.

For example, if I choose ‘Account’ here the auto-creation of
folders would start at the Account level and go down to any
related entities from there. I choose to add a document I have
created for an Opportunity (Test Sale) related to an Account
(Test Company). The resulting folder structure would
utomatically be created in SharePoint:

Not all organizations will use Accounts or Contacts as primary
entities so this is optional. If you don’t select Account or Contact
the resulting folder structure (from the above example) would
be: http://ServerName/Opportunity/Test Sale

6) Once this step is complete you can add documents to any of
the entities you selected in step 3.  

In addition to letting the system handle the creation of the
document folders, you will probably want to utilize existing
SharePoint Collection Sites as well.

To link a record to an existing SharePoint Location:

1) Click on ‘Add Location’ on the record toolbar:

2) Paste the URL of the SharePoint location into the
“Specify the URL of an existing SharePoint Folder’ line.

That’s it! Just two steps to link to an existing location.

This concludes the walkthrough for the ‘Out-of-Box’ integration
between Dynamics CRM 2011 and SharePoint 2010. There are
many more integration possibilities between these two
applications. I will be posting more next month.

- Doug Hunter 

 

If you are a longtime Dynamics CRM user you have probably
wanted this feature available to you at some point. It was
actually part of the CRM 4.0 codebase during Beta, but left
out of the final release. I have needed/wanted it for years
and it is finally here.

‘Data Enrichment’ is part of the Data Management feature set.
It allows you to export a set of records like opportunities
for example, edit them in Excel and re-import (update) them
back into CRM. You can even add new records to the same
Excel worksheet and they will be imported as new records.
Data Enrichment is extremely useful for bulk updates of
existing data, even if the people doing the updates are not
CRM users! You can just export the CRM data to Excel and
have them modify the worksheet data before reimporting it.
 
Let’s walk through a scenario where I want to update some
product records stored in a custom entity ‘Other Products’.
I need to edit the values for ‘Program’, Price Level’ and
Product Classification’ for many records. I prefer to do this
kind of editing in Excel rather than CRM.
 
The high-level steps:
 
1) Select the set of records to update. Use an existing view
such as ‘Active Other Products’ or create an Advanced Find
query to build the record set.

2) From the ‘Grid’ view select ‘Export to Excel’ from the
toolbar:

 

3) A dialog box opens, from which you can select the export
type. Only choose a ‘static’ type for Data Enrichment
(Dynamic will not work). Be sure to check the box below
making the data ‘available for re-import’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4) After selecting ‘Export’ you will be prompted to ‘save’
the file, which you can then open in Excel.

5) Pull-down menu items are included in the export to
maintain data consistency:

 

 

 

 

 

 6) After updating the data in Excel, you can reimport
the file by clicking the ‘Import Data’ button.

 

 

 

 

 

 

7) Follow the Data Wizard prompts to complete the
re-import. After the import you can review the import job
for more details.

 

 

 

 

 

The updated records appear in the grid as expected.

 

 

 

Nice, simple, but powerful editing capabilities are now
available through ‘Data Enrichment’.

- Doug Hunter