Updated · Originally published
How does your sales team manage and share documents? Are those documents easily available to them within your CRM system?
With the new release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 users can create and manage private documents with OneDrive for Business and those documents can be accessed within Dynamics CRM in the document grid.
What is OneDrive for Business?
Although the names are often used interchangeably, OneDrive for Business is not the same as OneDrive. OneDrive is free online personal storage that you get with a Microsoft account or Outlook.com. OneDrive for Business is online storage intended for business purposes.
If you’re using Office 365, you get 1 TB of space in the cloud for OneDrive for Business.
OneDrive for Business is currently available in SharePoint Online and coming to SharePoint On-premises with SharePoint 2016.
How can you use OneDrive with Dynamics CRM 2016?
All files that you store in OneDrive for Business are private. You might create a private file to draft a sales pitch or preliminary quote.
Instead of leaving Dynamics CRM 2016 to find this file, you can access it from the account record or opportunity.
Documents stored in OneDrive for Business are automatically synced to your desktop and mobile devices. So you can easily open various Microsoft Office documents stored in OneDrive for Business from within the CRM mobile apps (phones and tables).
For example, if you put a presentation in CRM that is stored on OneDrive linked with an opportunity, that presentation is synced to all devices running OneDrive. You can open it from your phone or tablet, while in a meeting with your client.
What is the limitation of the OneDrive for Business connection?
According to the fine print on the “Folders aren’t supported. Documents in shared folders won’t appear in the Dynamics CRM document grid.”
Apparently, when you want to share a document with other users, it can be moved to an Office 365 group for collaboration or stored as a public document in SharePoint. This would seem to be a limitation, but the benefit is that you now have a choice.
From within your Dynamics CRM record, you can get a consolidated view of documents across SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, and Office 365 Groups.
Why use OneDrive for Business with Dynamics CRM?
OneDrive for Business, like OneDrive, is simple to use and user friendly. In fact, most people are using it already for their personal documents.
Now those documents will be easier to find, without leaving Dynamics CRM 2016.
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By Ryan Plourde, ForgeXRM,
