This is a multi-part series where we discuss how to integrate SharePoint and Salesforce. There isn’t a one size fits all, I will share a few of the different ways we’ve done it in past projects.
- Best In Class(es): Bringing Salesforce and Office 365 Together. Instead of forcing one platform to do it all, aim to leverage the best of both platforms: Salesforce and Office 365.
- Case management in Salesforce, documents in SharePoint. We created a folder creation process to store case files in SharePoint and giving users the full breadth of document capabilities of SharePoint.
- Uploading files to SharePoint tightly coupled to Salesforce metadata. We created a custom upload form to associate specific metadata from Salesforce to the file in SharePoint, along with providing Salesforce the references to the files.
- THIS POST: Salesforce Files Connect using a SharePoint Library. A basic approach to displaying files from SharePoint in Salesforce.
Coming Up:
- Enterprise search across Salesforce and SharePoint. Search and discovery across both platforms is essential for users, in this approach we created a hybrid search center to allow users to perform searches across both Salesforce and SharePoint.
The Salesforce Files Connect is rather limited when it comes to actual management and collaboration on documents. When paired with a library in SharePoint, it simply uses SP search and a search metadata field to return the associated files. It ignores folders. It also can only be pointed to a single library, it cannot return all documents across your site or tenant.
In our solution, files were uploaded to a separate SharePoint library, which contained account level documents, not case documents. Uploading was happening via a separate process so we didn’t have to enable uploading from Salesforce. If we did, we would’ve used one of the two previously mentioned methods. In the SharePoint library, we had a field for the account ID, which was updated by the file upload process. We updated the search schema to include it, and pointed the Files Connector to the library and viola, we had files in SharePoint!
Nothing really technical on this one. The Files Connect is a great way to get file visibility from an external store into Salesforce, but it doesn’t bring in document management capabilities. Check out the Salesforce support articles on how to set it up.
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