SharePoint–Salesforce Integration for Fast and Convenient Document Management

Summary

A nationwide telecom company used Salesforce Sales Cloud for sales activities and SharePoint Online to store, manage, and share sales documents and marketing content — but working in the two systems separately hampered document workflows and slowed communication with clients and prospects. INNERLUXES built a custom Lightning-framework app that integrates the two, letting staff work with SharePoint files directly from Salesforce, with single sign-on across both systems.

About the Client

The Client is a telecom company providing its services nationwide.

The Challenge

The Client used Salesforce Sales Cloud to support its sales activities and SharePoint Online to store, manage, and share its sales documents (contracts, orders, proposals) and marketing content (marketing demos, presentations, videos). The Client's sales and marketing employees had hampered document management workflows because they worked with the two systems separately. Communication with the Client's clients and prospects was also inefficient, since sales and marketing specialists couldn't share sales documents and marketing content stored in SharePoint directly from Salesforce.

The Solution

INNERLUXES's business analysts investigated the Client's business challenges and used them to elaborate detailed technical requirements for the application. Using the requirements, INNERLUXES's Salesforce developers created a custom application for Salesforce–SharePoint integration with the Lightning Component framework. The application appeared as a separate section in the Salesforce Account, Contact, and Opportunity records and enabled on-the-fly synchronization with SharePoint Online, which allowed:

• Searching for SharePoint files from Salesforce.
• Uploading files from Salesforce directly into SharePoint.
• Uploading files from Outlook (integrated with Salesforce) into SharePoint.
• Previewing and downloading SharePoint files right from Salesforce.
• Relating SharePoint files to particular Salesforce Account, Contact, and Opportunity records.
• Sharing a link to SharePoint files with Salesforce contacts via email.

To enable user access to Salesforce Sales Cloud and SharePoint Online via one set of login credentials, INNERLUXES's Salesforce and SharePoint developers set up single sign-on (SSO) using Salesforce SAML settings and Azure AD.

The application was made easily configurable, so users could set up an optimal mode of working with it, and INNERLUXES's developers created a user guide detailing the app's user settings and how to configure them.

The Results

• The Client got a reliable application aligning Salesforce Sales Cloud and SharePoint Online.
• The application made managing (searching, downloading, previewing, etc.) SharePoint files right from Salesforce much easier.
• It also streamlined sharing the necessary files with Salesforce contacts, facilitating communication with customers and prospects.

Technologies and Tools

Salesforce Sales Cloud, SharePoint Online, Lightning Component framework, REST API, OAuth 2.0.