Many organizations would like to have better integration between Dynamics CRM and SharePoint. The reasons are fairly straightforward. They may include:
- Lacking document management within CRM
- Greater organizational user base in SharePoint
- Ability to manage and publish customer-related documents
- Extending CRM and SharePoint data and operations to external users
Both systems have their strengths and some out-of-the-box integration is possible. You can add CRM entities to SharePoint libraries and you can add SharePoint libraries to CRM entities, but the bulk of the benefit here is simply connecting the data for viewing purposes (which is important in and of itself). Here is an article which explains how to do this:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg334768.aspx
But if you need CRM events to affect changes within SharePoint and visa versa, and if you require to set up business processes which touch and affect both systems, you looking at a major coding project.
The short answer is, there is a clean, simple way to integrate these two systems. We recently gave a webinar on this topic: Uniting SharePoint and Dynamics CRM for Business Critical Processes. You can watch it below:
(Please visit the site to view this video)
The solution involves using a Dynamics CRM plugin solution such as PNMsoft SCE which includes out-of-the-box integration activities with Dynamics CRM and SharePoint, as part of visual business workflows. This type of "glue" between CRM and SharePoint means you can create business processes that include both systems. Examples could be:
- A customer service process that updates customer-related documents in SharePoint
- Enabling customers to order a product or service, updating the order in both systems
- Document publishing processes which interact with CRM entities
- Marketing automation processes which update CRM entities and SharePoint lists
- A CRM catalog which takes its data from SharePoint
- Integrating both products with ERP and other external systems
This sort of automation around business processes can be very effective in multi-pronged, non-trivial business scenarios, like those mentioned above.
I'd be happy to hear about your business scenarios which require SharePoint-CRM integration.