While Salesforce stands alone as the leading CRM platform on the planet, you would necessarily want to use it as your primary document management & storage tool. This is where SharePoint comes in. Due to the high cost of storage, it makes sense to use a separate tool for document storage – rather than pay to store all your files directly within Salesforce. However, will there be several instances where you will need file access within your Salesforce Org? Yes. For this reason, the SharePoint to Salesforce integration has been one of the most popular and important.
Some of the key features for using the SharePoint to Salesforce integration tool:
· Storage – as we mentioned previously, Salesforce’s pricing model around data storage is much higher than that of SharePoint. Especially once you exceed Salesforce’s basic storage package.
· SharePoint specializes in document management – whether it be document collaboration, versioning, and file sharing. It just makes sense to have SharePoint do the heavy lifting on document storage – then connect that tool to Salesforce.
While there are a couple different options for building the integration between Salesforce and SharePoint – the tool we’ve found to be the most complete is Document Extractor.
Document Extractor automatically transfers documents saved in Salesforce to SharePoint and replaces the original documents with links pointing to them at SharePoint. How it works is that the users still reach the files where they originally saved them – in Salesforce under the respective accounts. Running in the background, Document Extractor detects files, moves them to the corresponding libraries in SharePoint and leaves a link in Salesforce instead. The user sees a link in the exact same place in Salesforce, so the user experience does not change.
Futhermore, whenever you add a document to a new object in Salesforce, Document Extractor will automatically create the correct folder to store it on SharePoint. This works for a Standard object like an Account, Contact, Lead, or Opportunity or a Custom object.
This tool is available in AppExchange. You can study the product description and features, try it for free or buy the SaaS version.