Benefits of Integrating SharePoint & Dynamics 365

Introduction

In any organization, increasing productivity is a crucial factor in driving the business forward. As companies adopt new and innovative IT tooling, it is important that they select tools that will work seamlessly with the ones already in use within the organization. By doing so, the amount of time spent switching between collaboration tools is minimized and any friction caused when sharing and organizing information is reduced. This ultimately manifests as both cost savings and a reduced administrative overhead in an IT department. In this blog post, we’ll cover why integrating SharePoint with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams will benefit your organization by improving productivity through centralized communications, file sharing and file storage.

What is SharePoint?

As a standalone product, SharePoint is a platform that allows you to connect, share files, manage content, and stay informed from anywhere and on any device. SharePoint users, on the standalone product, can build customizable content such as intranet sites lists, forms, pages, and document libraries to share information across their organization. All these files are saved in a cloud, so they are secure and accessible. While these offerings are robust on their own, SharePoint’s existing features can be supplemented by integrating the application with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams, essentially serving as a file repository or document sharing hub.

Live Demo of SharePoint Integration

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The Benefits of Integrating SharePoint With Dynamics 365

With Dynamics 365, you are provided with CRM software that can help increase your business’s profitability by streamlining processes in your sales, marketing, and service divisions. A strong CRM solution such as Dynamics 365 can be crucial to developing, retaining, and storing all information regarding your customer relationships, thus reducing redundancy in your organization. Dynamics 365 provides value to any organization by offering a platform to review insightful data, analytics, live data tracking and reporting, task automation, and enhanced communication. Once integrated with SharePoint, however, the features of Dynamics 365 are enhanced with improved data management, file processing, and collaboration, improving overall productivity and effectiveness as you are essentially combining a file organization tool with a CRM system (business application).

Key features of SharePoint Integration with Dynamics 365 are:

Increased storage: Dynamics CRM provides 5 GB storage and extra storage for $10 per GB, while SharePoint provides 10 GB and extra storage for $.20 per GB. File storage can slowly accumulate over time, but with this integration, you will be able to reap the benefits of increased storage at a lower cost thanks to SharePoint.
Enhanced Teamwork and Collaboration: Different teams in different locations can collaborate to work on a particular project in real-time with edits and revisions available and visible to all collaborators. SharePoint also allows you to engage non-CRM teams and leverage their abilities to improve productivity. Why is this valuable? Sales divisions within organizations often have information saved in disparate files or applications. This integration ensures that CRM users have the latest information at their fingertips in a centralized location, offering sales teams a wholistic and transparent view of data.
Document Sharing: Multiple users can edit and upload documents with having to worry about overwriting changes made by others. Share Point’s version control can force users to check out documents to make changes and check them back in upon upload. This level of version control ensures teams don’t overwrite each other’s changes in a shared system.

Security: The administrator approval feature secures access to specific records that are supported by SharePoint benefits.
Improved Mobility: Improved file management and linking will help manage, organize, and sort files according to your desired filter criteria, making it easier to find useful links, data and trends.

In conclusion, Dynamics 365 is an excellent CRM tool that can help businesses scale and enhance the quality of the service they provide. The features it provides make it easier to leverage information to make decisions. Integrating SharePoint improves the data and file management features of Dynamics 365, proving to be a valuable addition to any organization.

Integrating SharePoint With Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a collaboration and communication application that helps your team communicate and stay organized in a single interface. Within this application, you can schedule meetings by syncing your Outlook calendar, host calls, chat with other team members, and create channels where you can perform all the aforementioned features, in addition to sharing files.

This application is fantastic for a variety of reasons. All your information to complete a task will be in the same place. You can work in real-time and in the open with the document uploading feature, which eliminates the need to send out an extra email announcement with the file attached. You can also converse with your team right in your channel, eliminating the need to share links through Outlook.

SharePoint and Teams share similar organization structure in which team sites are organized by topic, project, organization, or some other focal point for a team of people. Thus, SharePoint integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Teams because specific teams and channels will often follow a similar structure to SharePoint Team and project sites.

Live Demo of SharePoint Integration

Receive a complimentary consultation with one of our experts to see how seamlessly Dynamics 365 can integrate with SharePoint.

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Key features of SharePoint Integration with Microsoft Teams are:

Similar Operation Structure: Document and co-authoring online versions of Office applications depend on special protocols (WOPI and FSSHTTP). Because these are built into SharePoint, it also works in Teams.
Increased File Viewing Capability: SharePoint provides previews for more than 300 file types, which can be viewed directly in the Teams file tab.
Security: SharePoint has comprehensive data governance and compliance features, so Teams documents will be protected from data loss prevention, automatic classification and labelling, eDiscovery and legal holds, and document retention policies.

Easily Create Pages: Add SharePoint pages as tabs in Teams without building a custom website from scratch. All of the information from your team home site will live there, allowing you to experience the best of both SharePoint and Teams in the same interface.
Easy File Access: Users won’t have to open another application to work with their files. Within Teams, files will appear in the Files tab; the “Open in SharePoint” option will direct users straight to the SharePoint site.

In conclusion, Microsoft Teams is an excellent collaboration tool that can be strengthened by integrating SharePoint. Because Microsoft products are designed to integrate with their suite of products, you can easily combine different applications and platforms to improve communication and productivity throughout your organization. Integrating SharePoint with Teams and Dynamics 365 is easy and will benefit any organization with upgraded features.