Salesforce SharePoint Integration – Salesforce is the world’s #1 cloud-based CRM giant offering comprehensive CRM solutions to millions of leading brands across the globe. However, when it comes to document management, Salesforce was not exclusively designed to be a Content Management platform. Instead, it is an integrated CRM solution that gives all your departments, including sales, service, marketing, commerce a 360-degree view of customers to deliver omnichannel and personalized experiences that your customers expect. Microsoft SharePoint, on the other hand, is a robust and feature-stuffed document management and collaboration platform that enables companies to manage archives, documents, reports, and other data that are crucial to business processes. It is extensively used as a secure document repository for intranet portals, websites, cloud-based services and much more.
Integration between these two systems captures the essence of both Salesforce and SharePoint to make all files available on a single interface while significantly driving down costs of maintaining two individual platforms. Salesforce SharePoint integration enables Salesforce users to effortlessly access and manage office documents including spreadsheets and presentations, share posts, join groups, instantly share huge files, collaborate better and much more.
Salesforce SharePoint Integration Vs Salesforce Chatter
Alternatively, you can use Salesforce Chatter to share files and data across your organization. Salesforce Chatter is an exquisite enterprise collaboration platform that allows employees across the organization to share and collaborate seamlessly using the platform. It supports feeds, profiles and groups to allow data sharing and communication among Salesforce users. It reduces the number of emails you send and receive by communicating with colleagues through tools within Chatter such as news feed, group forums, file sharing, and online chat. In fact, according to a Salesforce report, Chatter reduces email by a staggering 30%.
However, Chatter free users have limited rights. Though you can view Chatter profiles, join groups and post updates, you cannot see Salesforce data and records or edit document right in Salesforce. This could be a hindrance for collaboration between Salesforce users and employees without licenses. You can overcome this by buying more Salesforce Sales Cloud licenses (starting at $25 per user per month). However, there are two main cons here – high license costs and limited capabilities for collaboration with external stakeholders and internal departments that don’t use Salesforce.
To get around this, companies can use SharePoint as their enterprise collaboration tool and Salesforce as their CRM. This enables cross-departmental collaboration to happen within the SharePoint intranet and external stakeholder collaboration using the extranet part of SharePoint. When a company decides on this option, it is critical that they carefully choose the right Salesforce SharePoint integration partner to facilitate frictionless user experiences in the future.
Article Resource: DemandBlue Blogs
