Dynamics 365 + SharePoint. Why is this still an problem?

Microsoft has used words like “seamlessly” integrated when speaking about Dynamics 365 and SharePoint, and I have hated it since day one. CRM and SharePoint never seemed to get it right, and after a while I feel they just gave up. The current state of the integration is in most cases utterly useless.

Larger companies

The larger companies will require scalability and security. The integration has none of these in combination. The standard integration has absolutely no idea what security is, and therefore opens all documents for everyone with site access. In larger organizations they might want to separate the BU’s or even more granular access like team access in CRM. This is where you have to use 3rd party tools like Connecting Software. The second you start adding security to folders, you will hit the cap of 50k something unique permissions in a DocLib.

Result: Fail

Smaller companies

The smaller companies have the highest requirements in regards to simplicity. They expect it to be easy to drag/drop files, navigate a simple folder structure, merge documents from CRM that end up in the SP folder etc. In general the smaller companies are always benchmarking the CRM system against smaller collaboration solutions, and therefore expect simple usage. Again the standard isn’t enough.

Result: Fail

Microsoft Teams, the new hope

So with the introduction of Teams + Dynamics integration, we might be somewhat closer to a solution for collaboration that could work. For the first time it makes sense to include others outside of Dynamics 365 to collaborate on the documents. A salesperson could now easily work together with others in the organization that don’t have the Dynamics license. I will show you how in a later blogpost.

Does this mean that we can use the word “seamless” in regards to integration? NOPE, but we are one step closer. My biggest concern is still that the product teams working on this seem to be forgetting to solve the simple features. When you merge a document out of Dynamics, it should be easy to put it back in to Dynamics (SP folder) where it belongs! We should need to have solutions like Documents Core Pack or Xperido for the simple templates.

Anyway. Stay tuned for the next blog when I show how cool the new integration with Teams is:)