Technology and Financial Solutions Provider Integrates Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Logan Consulting Implements Microsoft SharePoint 2003 and Integrates it with Microsoft CRM

The Client

Our client is a premier independent technology and financial solutions provider dedicated to helping its clients solve business challenges with an integrated suite of solutions for technology acquisition, finance and disposition.

For more than 15 years, our client has provided Fortune 1000 and emerging mid-market organizations with a wide range of creative and cost-effective solutions designed to address business challenges and manage risk across the complete business-technology life-cycle. They do this by offering an integrated suite of solutions for the acquisition, financing and disposal of IT assets. As a result, their clients realize the optimum return on their technology investment.

Their seasoned account teams provide expertise in designing custom solutions for specific areas such as enterprise servers, network design, telephone and storage.

The Opportunity

Relational was in need of a document collaboration tool that will work seamlessly with Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM.

More specifically, the sales team, currently supporting our client’s three businesses, Network, Pro Services, and Voice, was in need of a file sharing application that can work effortlessly with their current Microsoft CRM application. Currently, the sales process requires the use of advanced Excel “Workbooks” to manage a sales cycle (up to 6-9 months). These “Workbooks” contain critical dynamic data that ultimately produce Sales Quotes, Rebate Forms, and Profit Analysis Reports.

The Sales group’s sales cycles are long and at times can include products/services from all three businesses. These sales efforts can change scope frequently requiring reworking the deal over and over. The current process had proven to put much stress on the back office group as changes were needed. Therefore the need for up to date document sharing was critical. As one group completed their section of the workbook, another group needed the confidence that they are working with the latest version.

In order to achieve this objective our client will need to implement a Microsoft solution called SharePoint. SharePoint is a collaboration tool that will allow their personnel to better share information.

The Result

Logan Consulting implemented Microsoft SharePoint 2003 and integrated it with their already existing Microsoft CRM application.

Specifically, we built an additional “Documents” tab in the CRM Opportunity entity. Here we added a link to a SharePoint Documents Library for documents specific to this opportunity.

In order to accommodate the limitless number of documents that can be added to the library yet display only those associated with this opportunity, we added a filter that only displayed documents that share the OpportunityID and/or Account Number. We then created an interim redirect page that translated the URL into the format that we needed for Windows SharePoint Services to display the correct documents. We then used an ASP.NET page for the redirect page.

The result was one document library to maintain, but with the filtering to display only those documents that were associated to the opportunity at hand. RTS benefited from the rich SharePoint document library functionality such as “check in” and “check out”, e-mail alerts when the document has been modified, discussions, approvals and direct integration with Microsoft Office.

Today the integration works seamlessly and end users do not know they are working with two independent applications. The confidence earned, and the time saved searching for the latest version of a document, are beyond price.