CRM Online to SharePoint Online Integration using REST and ADFS

Accessing SharePoint Online 2013 REST services with SSO via ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) from CRM Online provides loads of potential opportunities, especially now that SharePoint offers a huge REST API. You can call REST from a CRM Online Plugin or Custom Workflow activity with no dependencies on SharePoint Client dll’s or Azure getting in the way, It is fairly awesome I must say.

I use the HttpWebRequest class to perform SOAP requests to perform the authentication part of this integration, which is totally supported within Sandboxed Plugins and Custom Workflow Activities. You can read more about the restrictions of the CRM Sandboxed environment here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg334752.aspx. Once you get authenticated and obtain the cookies you are free to fire REST calls off by simply providing the cookies along with the request.

The best diagram I found to describe the authentication process visually was from Wictor Wilen’s blog http://www.wictorwilen.se/

I wanted to explore the issue…