SharePoint is a web-based document management system developed by Microsoft to facilitate organizational document sharing and team collaboration. With its built-in Office 365 integration, it quickly became an ‘Enterprise favorite.’ SharePoint provides users with an excellent security model and many customization options ensuring only the right people have access to the right documents.
Dynamics 365 is the business solutions giant from Microsoft. It’s an immense product with loads of sub-products (Apps) to cover most, if not all, of your business requirements.
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Any business solution will need document management at some point. Instead of building something from scratch, Microsoft chose the smarter path: An Integration between Dynamics 365 and SharePoint gives users the best of both worlds.
Benefits and limitations of documents in Dynamics 365 without SharePoint
Let’s take a look at how Dynamics 365 copes without the SharePoint integration. It is not hard to attach documents directly in Dynamics.
The main benefits of using Dynamics 365 to store documents are:
- No configuration needed, just stick the ‘Notes’ on the form and voila.
- Straightforward and easy to use. If you know how to navigate in Dynamics 365, you’ll find it easy to add notes attachments to entities
But there are limitations:
- Files store directly in the Dynamics 365 database. If you have many files, it will significantly increase storage space.
- No collaboration possible (no check in/check out functionality)
- Size limit on attachments. It is not possible to attach files over 5 MB unless it’s on-premise; this can be increased to 9 MB which is still not mind-blowing.
- No access to non-Dynamics users. It is not possible to share a document with a customer or reseller.
- No search functionality. If you need to look for a specific document without knowing the entity it was attached to; it is close to impossible to find.
Projects that use Dynamics 365 to store their documents are usually small. Users may need to attach a document here or there, but that’s all. If your business is serious about Document Management, SharePoint is miles ahead of Dynamics 365 in this area.
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Benefits of using SharePoint integration
It’s not impossible to attach documents without SharePoint, but if a business needs a suitable document management process, it is not ideal.
This is where SharePoint integration comes in to play:
No effect on the Dynamics 365 Database
SharePoint was created to store documents. Their database is designed to support a large number of file uploads. Dynamics 365 utilizes entity tables and fields. Using SharePoint to store your organization’s files and folders is much more efficient and less expensive (additional storage in SharePoint is cheaper than in Dynamics 365).
Integrated security model
The SharePoint integration allows users to create, edit and share documents directly from Dynamics 365. Since records display in the context of an entity, those who don’t have access to the entity won’t have access to the documents.
Sharing with people outside of your organization
It may be a requirement to share documents with customers, distributors, contractors, or any individual that is not an active Dynamics 365 user. With the correct permissions and authorization rights, your documents can be shared from the SharePoint platform, and the level of access can be controlled.
Document synchronization and team collaboration
With it’s out of the box check in/check out functionality, SharePoint allows multiple users to edit and update specific documents without overwriting others’ changes.
Large size attachments
Unlike the 5 MB size limit in Dynamics 365 (9 MB for on-premise deployments), SharePoint has a maximum limit of 50 MB. It may not sound like much, but let’s be honest, if a document is over 50 MB, you probably don’t want to read it.
Document history
SharePoint provides document version history functionality out of the box. It is easy to see when a document was created, when it was edited, who edited it, and what was edited.
OneNote Integration
Notes in Dynamics 365 are great, but they just provide basic functionality. If you want to integrate Microsoft’s OneNote with your Dynamics 365 organization, you will need to enable the SharePoint integration first since this is where the notebooks reside.
Office Delve
Delve is a tool announced by Microsoft to help you ‘smartly’ discover the documents you’re looking for. It uses Artificial Intelligence with all your meetings, emails, calendar, yammer…and finds the content you’re working on before you look for it. Searching for content in your documents can be a time-consuming task, but with Delve, you may not even have to look.
Want more information on what a partnership with Sherweb looks like? Check out our InfoKit.
Conclusion
Microsoft is a dominant technology force in the Enterprise world. It has spent years in the market studying business requirements and developing solutions to cover all business needs.
For the past couple of years, we’re witnessing a huge move to the cloud from all the major technology players. This is not easy to accomplish as many businesses have spent years building their IT infrastructure and it is hard just to let go of it. On the other hand, having all resources in the cloud makes it easier for big companies to facilitate integrations between their services (since the cloud is really in their data centers).
Microsoft SharePoint integration is one of the most on-demand integrations for any company owning Dynamics 365, and that is for a good reason. Documents form a huge part of any business, so having a smooth integration between Dynamics 365 and SharePoint is critical for high-level document management and higher productivity. With Microsoft simplifying the integration process with each iteration of Dynamics 365, let’s see how they continue to improve on what’s currently available.
