Exposing, Finding and Analyzing Dynamics CRM 4.0 Data with SharePoint 2007

Last Tuesday I hosted the CRM Technical Evening Session @ Microsoft Belgium. I spoke about (some of) the integration possibilities between SharePoint 2007 and Dynamics CRM 4.0.

Given the limited amount of time, the session’s scope was limited to:

  • a one way integration only: Getting our CRM data in SharePoint so we could expose, find & analyze it. Also, since the session was targeted at CRM partners, it didn’t cover any CRM customizations (like SiteMap, ISV.config or IFrames) in order to show the results back in Dynamics CRM
  • “Power”-User skills only: it wasn’t allowed to write a single line of .NET code.

The evening was packed with demos build around one simple scenario: We have a bunch of customer satisfaction survey results in Dynamics CRM: “the data”. By the end of the session, we wanted to have “information”: Are our customers satisfied? On what should we focus to improve our overall satisfaction? Should we improve friendliness or is there another aspect that influences the overall satisfaction?
In order to answer these questions we really went through the entire Microsoft stack of products: Dynamics CRM, SharePoint 2007, Office 2007, SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 (& the very handy new Report Builder 2.0) & SQL Server Analysis Services 2008.

Download the slides here.