Chapter 1. Integrating Microsoft CRM 4.0 with Windows SharePoint Services

If you are reading this Wrox Blox, you probably have a fairly decent understanding of Microsoft CRM (MSCRM) and how beautifully MSCRM provides solutions for managing customer relationships. The primary goal of any company adopting a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application is to improve the quality of interaction with the customer. MSCRM is one of the best CRM tools, offering an amazingly simple yet very powerful technology platform for organizations to build a CRM strategy to better know their customers.

In the last two years, MSCRM has grown at such a breathtaking speed that today there is a great demand for integrating MSCRM with other applications such as a custom web site, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, SharePoint portals, and the like. Most of the organizations implementing CRM solutions have their own web sites or SharePoint servers to manage different customer needs and want to integrate them with MSCRM to improve efficiency and productivity and save time for their users. To understand the need for MSCRM integration, imagine that the lead (potential customer) for your organization is generated in the following two ways: