Chapter 11: Integration with External Applications

Overview

If you've read this far, you should have a good understanding of the different customization and integration capabilities that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 offers. However, your organization probably uses multiple applications to manage different parts of your operation. Maybe your corporate Web site generates new incoming leads for your salespeople, or perhaps your department makes heavy use of document libraries in Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. By leveraging Microsoft CRM customization and integration tools, you can integrate the data stored in Microsoft CRM with these other types of business applications to enhance your users' productivity and efficiency.

You already know that Microsoft CRM provides out-of-the-box integration with different applications, such as:

• Microsoft Office Outlook

• Microsoft Office Excel

• Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services

• Microsoft Exchange Server

Although integration with these applications provides great benefits, these systems represent only a fraction of the integration opportunities available to your organization. Microsoft CRM can integrate with almost any application that offers a method to extract or retrieve data programmatically, so the integration possibilities are almost endless. Some common Microsoft CRM integration requests that we hear include:

• Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies

• Custom Web sites (intranets or extranets)

• Microsoft Office products, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Access, Microsoft OneNote, and Microsoft Visio

• Microsoft Dynamics products, such as Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft Dynamics SL

• Custom applications

• Third-party applications

Of course, we couldn't possibly explain the integration details for all of these systems in the book, so this chapter focuses on the following two common integration scenarios:

• Integrating external Web site data with Microsoft CRM

• Integrating Microsoft CRM with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services

We will explain how you can quickly integrate these applications to work with Microsoft CRM.