salesforce.com CRM Management Solutions
Each of these salesforce.com
CRM solutions are grounded in best practices collected from hundreds of thousands of sales professionals supported over three decades. You will increase the velocity of your sales cycle, eliminate sales bottle necks and maximize your sales team’s effectiveness in less than 30 days.
Baker Sales Systems will help you:
- Significantly expand
the capacity of your sales, marketing and
business development teams
- Improve the
efficiency of your sales prospecting funnel
- Dramatically decrease
your sales cycles
- Promote selling
clarity, motivation and sales proficiency
- Expand the geographic
reach of your marketing, sales and customer
services organizations
- Dramatically reduce
the time required to roll out sales improvement
initiatives
MS CRM is very close to document workflow automation,
including Microsoft Office documents: Words, Excel, etc. The
document workflow was perfectly automated about 10 years ago in
Lotus Notes Domino. In this small article we describe the
solution based on MS CRM integration with MS SharePoint.
Microsoft CRM is new player on CRM applications market and it is
gaining its market share. Having different paradigm in its
design (it stakes on Microsoft OS and technologies and
completely disregards alternative platform, such as UNIX, Linux,
Oracle, etc. based). Microsoft CRM market is very diversified:
from small (5 users) to large (several hundred MS CRM User
licenses) and it serves variety of industries: Transportation,
Logistics, Lawyers, Pension Funds, High-Tech, and many others.
Deploying technologies, like Windows Active Directory, Microsoft
Exchange 2003/2000, SQL Server, Crystal Reports Enterprise,
Biztalk, Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Great
Plains and Navision in close future - makes CRM a beloved system
for Microsoft oriented IT departments.
Let's go right to the topic.
Major issue with storing documents in MS CRM in the form of
attachments to Activity is inability to work on these attached
files in cooperation with other colleagues, who do not have to
use CRM. When several service people serve requests from the
same client this is required. Currently you can use alternative
way when you store office documents in the folders of your file
system and when modifying document, you save it and reattach to
CRM. This is inconvenient, because first it requires all your
editing users to have CRM licenses, which delays CRM
implementation.
We seem increasing popularity of document storage systems, like
Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle Files, etc. Such systems, being
implemented gives you time savings, related to documents
revisions and versioning, approval cycles and workflows, web
access through web-portals systems and the like.
The target of our product is Microsoft SharePoint integration
with MS CRM for document storage. Let's take a look at the high
level technical realization details:
Main modification from the MS CRM side is standard system
behavior change when you open attachment in Activity. Standard
unmodified CRM suggests you to store documents in the file
system. Modified version sores document in SharePoint Document
Library (the required library is subject for setup by MS CRM
system administrator) or keep it in MS CRM as is (for documents
of minor importance). From the moment of saving the document in
SharePoint Document Library it is not stored in MS CRM - CRM
will now store only the link/reference to the document. Also you
are given the ability to open and modify the document at the
place of opening, which speeds up MS CRM user performance
substantially.
Table, storing the links to the documents sits in separate
database and doesn't deal with MS CRM tables (you know that you
are banned to do structure changes in MS CRM db)
Document saving into MS SharePoint process occurs in MS CRM and
with its assistance - SharePoint bridge, which does addition and
update for the existing document into destination Document
Library with MS SharePoint Web Services calls
Upon the addition into Document Library, MS CRM - SharePoint
bridge registers the document in the special table for the
future data extraction or notification mechanism registration
Then, interested users can work with the documents just using MS
Office 2003 or other programs/editing tools, assuming these
tools have access to MS SharePoint
Feedback is provided by MS SharePoint Event Handler component.
This is special handler, inspecting document change status,
transferred from MS CRM to document storage (SharePoint), and
report Activity owner on the changes with home page
notifications (User home page in MS CRM). User in turn can
review the history of the document editing - who, when and where
is the change
Opening Activity, where document is "attached", and in fact
placed into MS SharePoint
Document Library, and pressing opening button, MS CRM user gets
live version of the data
This approach allows you seamless work with MS CRM document in
the whole informational space of your company
Additional enhancements to this product might be document
library management directly from MS CRM (web interface - meaning
remotely), administrative interface for MS SharePoint documents
revision, ability to create reports on the document storage
status, rights/access management (Author, Reader, Contributor
etc) from MS CRM, portal pages integration into MS CRM to name a
few.
Happy programming, implementation, customization and
modification!
Source: Boris Makushkin
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