Server-Based SharePoint Integration in CRM Online – Step By Step

This post takes you through a step by step scenario on configuring Server-Based SharePoint Integration. Whether you do it for a demo environment, your production or a development environment, as long as you do it for Dynamics CRM Online with O365 SharePoint, the following steps apply.

Assumption is that, as in this case, a new 30-day O365 and CRM Online instance was just spun up. You can do the trial O365 first, then from the admin console add the CRM Online trial, or vice-versa.

The simple way to start is, as soon as your instance is up and running, you will get the notification bar. Click on the Enable Now button.

This triggers the configuration, which presents you first with the following message screen. Click Next…

Now you are on the first stage of the configuration wizard. Observe that you can choose to integrate with wither SharePoint Online (within your O365 subscription) or with SharePoint On-Premise. Now, keep in mind that your SharePoint On-Premise must be accessible from the internet in order for Dynamics CRM Online to be able to connect to it, obviously.

I’ve selected Online for this scenario. Click Next…

Next step lets us input the URL to the SharePoint site collection. Once you enter it, click Next again…

From my O365 Admin portal I navigated to the SharePoint Administration area to retrieve the available URL. While doing this with O365 and CRM Online, you can get to it from the main admin center.

Once you click Next, the URL is validated. Since this is all under O365 this is very fast and straight-forward.

Once you click Enable, if all goes well, you are notified that the configuration is complete, as seen below. Note the check box to start the Settings Wizard. Select it to proceed. You can start this wizard at a later time also from the CRM Settings area, but since you are already here let’s look at it now.

Once you selected the Document Management Settings Wizard and clicked Finish, the following steps have not changed much from the previous versions. First step prompts you to select the entities to be configured for Document Management integration with SharePoint. Choose the ones you need.

Re-enter the URL to the SharePoint site that will host these document libraries, and click Next.

On the next window you are prompted to choose the base entity to use when defining the folder structure. For this example I have selected to use this option, and choose Account.

Click Next when complete.

Once you clicked Next, a prompt lets you know that the process has been triggered, and it might take a while. Simply click OK. This is kind of a redundant message.

The next screen shows us the progress on creating the folder structure on the SharePoint side for each entity type.

Once completed, you should see the Succeeded message for each entity, and the totals at the top of the form. Click Finish.

And with this, the integration setup and configuration is complete. Now you can go into your CRM, hit the Account entity or any other entity you have configured, and hitting the Documents link will get you to the SharePoint documents.

When hitting it the first time for a record, you will get prompted to create the folder on SharePoint. Click Confirm.

After a quick moment you will see the view to the document library.

If you navigate to SharePoint > Site Contents you will see new document libraries for each of the entities we selected to enable for SharePoint documents during the wizard. Drilling into Accounts now we can see the account we have browsed to before from CRM as a folder using the name of the Account followed by a unique ID.

Now you can start taking advantage of default SharePoint functionality and even share these folders/document with non-CRM users.

As simple as this, now we have Dynamics CRM and SharePoint integrated. No more installing any List Component on SharePoint. What a breeze, especially when building a quick demo environment.

Enjoy!