Linking a site collection or site in Office 365 SharePoint to an opportunity in Salesforce Sales Cloud
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Microsoft and Salesforce – Part 4

By Niraj Tenany  |  Published on December 10, 2014

Netwoven Blog

Linking a site collection or site in Office 365 SharePoint to an opportunity in Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce and other CRM systems are great systems for managing data related to sales pipeline. However, they fall short when collaboration needs to occur between various parts of the organization. Often, only sales people have access to Salesforce or other CRM systems but broader group has to work on a lead or opportunity.

We get asked by clients often about how best to improve collaboration without adding additional licensing costs.

Opportunities

SharePoint On-Premise and SharePoint Online that is part of Office 365 can play a big role here. Let’s face it! SharePoint has become the defacto standard for company collaboration. It’s easy to create a SharePoint site where collaboration can occur. Generally the entire organization has access to SharePoint so there is no need to purchase additional licenses.

Let me walk you through a potential solution to integrate SFDC and SharePoint:

  • A lead enters SFDC. This lead can be directly entered by the salesperson in SFDC or can be synced from one of the Marketing automation tools such as Pardot, Marketo, or Eloqua
  • This lead at some point of time is converted into an opportunity.
  • At the time when the lead is converted to an opportunity, a workflow can be initiated to create a SharePoint sub-site related to this opportunity. This SharePoint site can be in On-Premise SharePoint or Office 365 SharePoint.
  • During the site creation process, the security associated in SFDC can be replicated to the SharePoint site. In addition, additional users can be added to the SharePoint site for collaboration on the opportunity.
  • At the same time, the link to the sub-site can be posted back into SFDC so there is a direct connection from SFDC to the SharePoint site where collaboration is occurring
  • These sites can be created using a standard SharePoint Opportunity template that can be created so each of the opportunities in SharePoint have similar structure
  • We also need to ensure that Single Sign-on occurs between the two applications, namely, SFDC and SharePoint.

I have implemented this with some customers and have found this to be an acceptable solution.

If you are a large organization, a site can be created for each opportunity. If you are a smaller organization, a folder can be created for each opportunity. It does not have to be complex.

You can also read a post by Viraj Bais from Netwoven for additional technical details. Here’s a link to it on SlideShare.

Please find my other posts from the same series below:

By Niraj Tenany

Niraj is Chief Executive Officer and a Co-founder of Netwoven, responsible for the strategic vision and direction. Niraj has been working with Fortune 500 companies to implement large-scale enterprise systems for the past 25 years. Prior to founding Netwoven, Niraj led a profitable Enterprise Applications Consulting Practice at Microsoft. His team implemented large scale deployments of enterprise applications like Siebel, Ariba, and SAP with Fortune 500 customers. Niraj’s team also led the design and implementation of OLAP solutions based on the Microsoft platform. Prior to joining Microsoft, Niraj led a profitable Business Intelligence Consulting practice with Oracle Consulting Services. Niraj has also worked with startup organizations in senior management positions. Niraj was the Director of Consulting Services at Zaplet, a Kleiner Perkins funded company. Niraj holds a BS in Computer Science from Birla Institute of Technology, India, an MS in Computer Science from State University of New York (SUNY), and an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in North Carolina.

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