Our sales person is always irritated with having to save proposals in CRM, and on the other hand documents in Sharepoint. The way CRM handles attachments is not the most user friendly or eye catching of features.
I have not told her that there are custom integration solutions between CRM and Sharepoint; that is our secret.
But I did tell her that in the future release of CRM 2011, the ability to integrate Sharepoint and CRM comes with the product.
I swear I thought I saw a tear of happiness come to her eye. When I told my fellow consultants they got down right giddy.
Sharepoint 2010 and CRM 2011 are a match made in document management heaven. With Sharepoint 2010 installed along with a special Sharepoint list part and a few configuration items set in CRM 2011 you can have document folders set up automatically in Sharepoint when you create entities in CRM.
And documents created, updated, and saved in those Sharepoint folders will be available in CRM. Plus you can do this integration with a combination of on premise and online solutions between the two products. The online to online integration is still in the works but promises to be ready for the release of CRM 2011 at the beginning of next year.
Though the integration works with Sharepoint 2007, the list part that allows the automatic folder creation is only available for Sharepoint 2010. So do yourself and your salesperson a favor; be sure and put a line item in your budget for upgading to Sharepoint 2010 right alongside the line item for upgrading to CRM 2011. Your salesperson and the rest of your staff with thank you for it.