MsCRM2011 with Sharepoint.pdf

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Microsoft Official Training Materials for Microsoft Dynamics®

Your use of this content is subject to your current services agreement

Integrating Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 2011 with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2010

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Objectives

The objectives are:

• Review SharePoint Components

• Explain SharePoint Storage Concepts

• Examine Integration Scenarios

• Review when to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM versus SharePoint when Customizing a Solution

Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics Integration Overview

Microsoft SharePoint Server is a collaboration and content management application that simplifies how people store, find, and share information. It helps people to collaborate effectively by having secure access to documents and information that they require to make business decisions.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM supports integration with SharePoint and its document management capabilities can be used in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Documents can be stored and managed in a Microsoft Dynamics CRM record on a server that is running SharePoint, and it will use the SharePoint infrastructure to share, manage, and collaborate efficiently. Because the documents are stored on a server that is running SharePoint, non-Microsoft Dynamics CRM users can directly access the documents on the server, provided they have the appropriate permissions on the server that is running SharePoint Server.

Organizations that have SharePoint integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, can perform the following:

• Create, upload, view, and delete documents on a server that is running SharePoint from Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

• Use the SharePoint document management features in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, such as checking the document in and out, viewing version history, and changing document properties.



Module 1: Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 2011 and Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Integration Concepts

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Microsoft SharePoint versions supported for integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

SharePoint Server integration is supported for the following versions and editions:

• SharePoint Server 2010

• SharePoint Server 2010 Online

• SharePoint Server 2007

• SharePoint Server 2007 Online

Note: You should be aware that in SharePoint 2010, Foundation, Standard, and Enterprise are all supported.

Later in this course, the specifics of the default integration between these two applications are explored. However, some additional items to be aware of when you select one version or the other should be discussed now. For location records to be automatically created on a SharePoint Server, SharePoint Server 2010 and the Microsoft Dynamics CRM List Component for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 must be installed on the target server that is running SharePoint Server. If SharePoint Server 2007 is being used, the documents from SharePoint Server are displayed in an IFRAME, and folders cannot be automatically created on the server that is running SharePoint Server.




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SharePoint Storage Concepts By using the SharePoint Server document management capabilities, users can control the life cycle of documents in their organization, such as how documents are created, reviewed, published, and disposed of or archived. SharePoint Server uses a hierarchical storage model to store and manage documents. Some SharePoint Server storage concepts that a SharePoint professional should be familiar with include the following:

• Site Collection

• Site

• Document Library

• Document Folder

• List Views

These storage objects provide the framework for the content management infrastructure that SharePoint Server provides.

Site Collections

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 sites are made up of a site collection. This is a hierarchical structure that includes one top-level site and any sites underneath it. The sites in a site collection have shared administration settings, common navigation, and other common features and elements. Using site collections provide the following benefits for various groups of SharePoint users:

• Site Designers: A site collection's galleries and libraries provide a mechanism to create a consistent, branded user experience across all sites in the site collection.

• Site Collection Administrators: A site collection provides a consistent mechanism and scope for administration. For example, security, policies, and features can be managed for a whole site collection; Site Collection Web Analytics Reports, audit trail reports, and other data can help administrators track site collection security and performance.

• Farm Administrators: A site collection provides scalability for growth based on how much content is stored. Because each site collection can use a unique content database, administrators can easily move them to separate servers.




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• Site Authors: A site collection’s shared site columns, content types, Web Parts, authoring resources, workflows, and other features provide a consistent authoring environment.

• Site Users: A site collection's unified navigation, branding, and search tools provide a unified website experience.

Sites

There are many site templates that you can use to create a site collection. These templates include the following.

Site Collection Template Description

Assets Web Database An assets database to keep track of assets. This includes asset details and owners.

Basic Meeting Workspace Sites to plan, organize, and capture the results of a meeting. It provides lists for managing the agenda, meeting attendees, and documents.

Document Center A site to centrally manage documents in the enterprise.

Group Work Site This template provides a groupware solution that teams can use to create, organize, and share information. It includes the Group Calendar, Circulation, Phone-Call Memo, document library and other basic lists.

Social Meeting Workspace A site to plan social occasions. It will offer lists to track attendees, provide directions, and store pictures of the event.

Some available templates available when you create a site collection include the following. In total, there are twenty-nine templates available. For a comprehensive list and a brief description of each refer to technet.microsoft.com and search for Sites and site collections overview (SharePoint Server 2010).




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Document Library

Document libraries are collections of files on SharePoint Server 2010 that can be shared with other site users. Most document management features are delivered through document libraries. As part of document management planning, consideration is given to determine the type of document libraries that best fits an organization's needs.

There are several common library types. Some of these include the following.

Library Type Description

Library in a Team site Collaboration; easy sharing of content among peers; content control, such as versioning; SharePoint Server 2010 search.

Library in a portal area Content that is intended for a wider audience in the organization; similar to a library in a Team site, but typically implemented by using a stricter review and approval process.

Library in a Document Center site

A large-scale library that is useful as an enterprise knowledge base or historical archive; includes features to help users browse, search, and manage many documents in a deep hierarchy by using a set of specialized Web Parts.

For more frequently used library types, refer to technet.microsoft.com and search for Document library planning (SharePoint Server 2010).

Another useful aspect of document libraries is being able to save Microsoft Office® documents into these document libraries directly from the application. For example, when a user is saving a Microsoft Word document, he or she can save it directly to a document library.

Document Folder

A folder is a named subdivision of the content in a library similar to folders in a file system. The main purpose of folders is to logically organize content to match the expected functionality of the library. For example, if a library is intended to provide product specifications, the set of folders in the library could be named for each feature area in the product or for each team member who writes product specifications.




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List View

The core focus for all enterprise management solutions is to have users be able to easily search for and find content. When users browse through a library or folder, tree views and list views provide a simple interface for them to visually browse through content storage taxonomy.

Document Management There are three primary goals of document management:

• Ease of Use: By default, visitors, contributors, and content stewards will find document management features easy to use and manage, adaptable, fast to deploy, and highly capable. Document management features also improve and make it easier to create and manage documents.

• Enterprise Readiness: Regardless of the document management scenario, document management provides a high degree of performance at scale, rich feature depth, customizability, and extensibility. The document management features are infused with metadata and they use metadata to drive document retrieval functionality.

• Broad Participation: Everyone in the organization has access to, and can benefit from, document management features. Capabilities can be adjusted so that everyone can view just what they need.

This lesson will explore some common document management concepts in SharePoint 2010.

Versioning

Versioning is the method by which successive iterations of a document are numbered and saved. Although the default versioning control for a document library depends on the site collection template, versioning can be configured, depending on the particular organizational or team requirements. Each document library can have a different versioning control that best suits the type of documents in the library.




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SharePoint Server 2010 has three versioning options. They include the following.

Versioning Type Description

No versioning Specifies that no earlier versions of documents are saved. When versioning is not being used, the earlier versions of documents cannot be retrieved, and the document history is also not retained because comments that accompany the iteration of a document are not saved. This option is used on document libraries that contain unimportant content or content that will never change.

Create major versions Specifies that numbered versions of documents are retained by using a simple versioning scheme (such as 1, 2, 3).

Create major and minor (draft) versions

Specifies that numbered versions of documents are retained by using a major and minor versioning scheme (such as 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, and 2.1). Versions ending in .0 are major versions and versions ending with nonzero extensions are minor versions.

Check In and Check Out

Organizations can require users to check out documents from a document library before the documents are edited. The benefits of requiring check out and check in include the following:

• Better control of when document versions are created. When a document is checked out, the author can save the document without checking it in. These changes will not be visible to other users of the document library, and a new version will not be created. A new version (visible to other users) is only created when an author checks in a document. This gives the author more flexibility and control.

• Better capture of metadata. When a document is checked in, the author can write comments that describe the changes that are made to the document. This creates an ongoing historical record of the changes that are made to the document.




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Integration Scenarios There are many ways that Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint can be integrated. This lesson will explore some scenarios where the two applications can be used for functions they perform well and provide value to the organizations that deploy and use them.

There are many ways that Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint can be integrated. This lesson will explore some scenarios where the two applications can be used for functions they perform well and provide value to the organizations that deploy and use them.

Basic Document Management and Versioning

By using the default integration that exists between SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, users can check in, check out, open, upload and perform other basic document management actions from either the context of a Microsoft Dynamics CRM record or from the context of a document folder. For example, Microsoft Dynamics CRM users could open a particular account within the application and view documents that are related directly to that account. Additionally, they can open the documents that are related to records such as opportunities, cases, or any other related entity configured to use the SharePoint integration. SharePoint users could also review the document library structure where these customer documents are stored and manage them exactly as they can from Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

By using the default integration that exists between SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, users can check in, check out, open, upload and perform other basic document management actions from either the context of a Microsoft Dynamics CRM record or from the context of a document folder. For example, Microsoft Dynamics CRM users could open a particular account within the application and view documents that are related directly to that account. Additionally, they can open the documents that are related to records such as opportunities, cases, or any other related entity configured to use the SharePoint integration. SharePoint users could also review the document library structure where these customer documents are stored and manage them exactly as they can from Microsoft Dynamics CRM.




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Retrieving Microsoft Dynamics CRM Data in SharePoint Using Excel Services

Excel Services is a service application that is used to load, calculate, and display Microsoft Excel workbooks on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. You can pull Microsoft Dynamics CRM data by using dynamic pivot tables, Excel Services, and SharePoint. For example, a SharePoint designer could create a dynamic pivot table that pulls Microsoft Dynamics CRM accounts, account revenue, and will have a filter on accounts based on the number of employees. Excel Services could be leveraged and pulled into SharePoint 2010 to display this data. Additionally, a designer could incorporate charts and other visualizations of this data into a useful dashboard or through various Web Parts.

Dashboard with Filtering and Excel content

FIGURE 1.2: DATA ANALYSIS AND VISUALIZATION OF MICROSOFT DYNAMICS CRM DATA THROUGH EXCEL SERVICES




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SharePoint as a Reporting Platform

Organizations that create reporting pages and applications in SharePoint can have important information that is stored in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. There are a several approaches that can be used to expose Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 data through a SharePoint reporting application. One approach is for SharePoint Designer to create Data Views that can be based on any SQL Server database. This includes Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. Other options include Report Builder 3.0 integration with SharePoint or the Report Viewer Web Part on a SharePoint site.

Organizations that create reporting pages and applications in SharePoint can have important information that is stored in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. There are a several approaches that can be used to expose Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 data through a SharePoint reporting application. One approach is for SharePoint Designer to create Data Views that can be based on any SQL Server database. This includes Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. Other options include Report Builder 3.0 integration with SharePoint or the Report Viewer Web Part on a SharePoint site.

Using Power View and Power Pivot with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and SharePoint

Customers can take advantage of self-service business intelligence features that are provided by Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Power View. SQL Server 2012 has a new reporting Service add-in for SharePoint 2010 called Power View. Customers can use it to do the following:

• Interactive data exploration

• Visualization

• Presentation

• Intuitive ad hoc reporting for business users, data analysts, business decision makers and information workers

• Report designers can connect to Microsoft Excel Power Pivot or SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS).



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Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM Versus SharePoint When Customizing a Solution

In this lesson we’ll examine the basic positioning of SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, and the business problems they resolve.

Comparing SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics CRM have emerged as leaders in their product categories, and both are important application development platforms. They share many of the same fundamental architectural functions, that include the following:

• Run as server applications on the Windows platform.

• Are built on the .NET developer platform.

• Use Microsoft SQL Server as their database engine.

• Are web applications that run on the Internet Information Server (IIS).

• Can be deployed and used in the cloud.

Although the two products share the same foundations and have other similarities, they differ in important ways. Organizations must consider these differences when they decide which product is best for specific application requirements. Some of the most important differences include the following:

• Data model: SharePoint stores data in lists and libraries. For example, users can add an item to a list, and upload documents to a document library. These lists and libraries can be customized. Although a list resembles a table in a database application, SharePoint cannot create relationships between lists. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 has explicit out of the box support for relational database management features. Its "entities" correspond to database tables that have customizable "attributes" (columns), and it also has a powerful set of features that are used to create relationships between out of the box entities, and custom entities.




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• SharePoint Pages compared to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Forms: With SharePoint, the primary user experience is through webpages. Customizers of a SharePoint site can use the built-in user interface to create custom pages by using Web Parts, and SharePoint Designer can be used to create highly graphical custom pages. These webpages do not generally have any built-in data awareness, and can be created completely independent of any SharePoint lists or libraries. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 does not provide out of the box support for a generic webpage.

• Document management: SharePoint has powerful out of the box features that are designed for efficient and secure collaboration on shared documents, such as major and minor versions, content approval based on a security role, and the ability to require check outs before you can perform edits. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 documents can be attached to an entity's records. However, there is no support for versioning or any of the other document management features that are available in SharePoint.

• Query and Search: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 provides powerful end-user querying tools that are customized to the products’ relational database strengths. For example, users can easily include columns from multiple related entities that are in a single result set, and can sort and filter, based on values from related entities. With SharePoint, search is much less structured, and the experience is more similar to a Live or Bing web search experience where a user can enter a search keyword in the search box, and the SharePoint search engine will potentially find every occurrence of that keyword in every list, library, page or document in a whole collection. SharePoint enterprise search is less structured and much broader than Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 search, and offers users the potential to search across SharePoint content (including document libraries, lists, blogs, and wikis) and network file shares, external websites, and even Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

• .NET Framework Version: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 uses the .NET 4.0 Framework while SharePoint uses 3.5: Therefore, code written specifically for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 will generate exception errors when it tries to interact with the SharePoint Application Programming Interface (API). The workaround for this is to use Web Services Description Language (WSDL) based web services to make the communication easier.




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Requirements Best Suited for SharePoint

Based on the discussion in the earlier section, there are several reasons SharePoint is ideal for business functions, such as the following:

• Document management and collaboration

• Websites and web content management

• Reporting and dashboard applications

• Enterprise portals and Enterprise search

Document management and collaboration

This is the most common use of SharePoint, and it is what defines the SharePoint experience for many users, especially in the enterprise space. For many organizations, the transition from file-sharing by using an email message that has an attachment to the document-centric SharePoint model can provide significant productivity benefits.

Websites and web content management

Because SharePoint relies on webpages as its primary method to expose content to users, websites are a common use for the platform. Intranet web applications—those that give authenticated access to domain users on a Windows Server-based network—are the most common scenario for SharePoint. Increasingly, organizations are granting authenticated access to non-domain users to support an extranet scenario. SharePoint also has a connector license that organizations can purchase to grant anonymous access to users, and support a pure Internet website scenario.

Reporting and dashboard applications

SharePoint is ideal for reporting and dashboard-style applications that aggregate data from many sources and provide access to the data from one or more pages. One important reason for this is the high degree of customization available for SharePoint pages, in particular, Web Parts positioned on a page that can be used to provide access to many data sources.




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Enterprise portals and Enterprise search

Enterprise portals are one of the most popular scenarios that are used for SharePoint. For many enterprises, SharePoint is the standard portal by which employees and other stakeholders view, create, and collaborate on all documents, content, and other information that they must have to do their jobs. Closely related to this is enterprise search. SharePoint 2010 improved the SharePoint search engine with features such as “people search,” “indexing and searching on content that is external to SharePoint,” and now the Business Data Catalog provides a search from SharePoint on SQL database information. With these and other important features, many organizations rely on SharePoint search to make important information more easily available to the people who need it.

Requirements Best Suited for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 includes the following important default business functions:

• Sales management

• Marketing

• Customer service

• Service scheduling

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 excels as a development platform for line of business and relational database applications. The core functionality resembles a set of reference implementations that can be extended, and provides examples of how to create completely new applications in any line of business application scenario. In this context, some people have started to refer to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 as XRM. The “X“ indicates the platform's ability to support any line of business or industry scenario.




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Module Review Module Review

This module provided a brief overview of many key SharePoint features that can be used as part of the SharePoint integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. The features discussed include the following:

• Site Collections

• Sites

• Document Libraries

• Document Folders

• List Views

• Versioning

• Document Check In and Check Out

Additionally, this module examined several common integration scenarios that include the following:

• Excel Services

• Business Connectivity Services

• PowerPivot

• Power View

Finally, the module discussed what must be considered when you decide which business requirements are best suited for SharePoint and which are best suited for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.




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Test Your Knowledge

Test your knowledge with the following questions.

1. What are some other scenarios that you have experienced internally (in your company) or externally that you could use in the integration between Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and SharePoint 2010?

2. Which of the following SharePoint 2010 editions are supported when integrating with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011?

( ) SharePoint Server 2010 Foundation

( ) SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Search

( ) SharePoint Server 2010 Foundation Core

( ) SharePoint Server 2010 Standard Student

( ) SharePoint Server 2010 Developer

3. Both Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint use the .NET 4.0 Framework.

( ) True

( ) False




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Test Your Knowledge Solutions

Module Review and Takeaways

1. What are some other scenarios that you have experienced internally (in your company) or externally that you could use in the integration between Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and SharePoint 2010?

MODEL ANSWER:

For example, FAST Enterprise Search, Web Parts, Silverlight applications

2. Which of the following SharePoint 2010 editions are supported when integrating with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011?

(√) SharePoint Server 2010 Foundation

( ) SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Search

( ) SharePoint Server 2010 Foundation Core

( ) SharePoint Server 2010 Standard Student

( ) SharePoint Server 2010 Developer

3. Both Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint use the .NET 4.0 Framework.

( ) True

(√) False



MsCRM2011 with Sharepoint.pdf

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