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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Customer Service forum / Make SharePoint and Po...
Customer Service forum

Make SharePoint and Portals run i isolation to business units

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Posted on by Community Member

Hello guys,

I hope some of you kind people can push me in the right direction.
I work for a company that is primarily a SharePoint Online house, but we are currently evaluating Dynamics 365 Enterprise (Online) as a possible business platform for new future requirements.
To evaluate this do, I have thought of a small project (I am not a Dynamics 365 expert) and I would like some architectural feedback from you :)


The basic requirements are the following:
- one instance of Dynamics 365 needs to support multiple but isolated departments (in other words, they will use the same entities, however they cannot see other departments entity records (Contacts, Cases e.g.) unless those records are shared or added to a team). I think the business unit feature would work great here.
- They will all use the Case entity, however, the fields will not necessarily be the same (I don't know if using a single Case entity with multiple isolated business units might give some headaches because workflows need to be logically checked for the correct department in case the workflow runs as organization).

Where my current knowledge lacks...

SharePoint Online integration:
- besides Entity record separation, each department also produce lots of Word and Excel documents and these documents are currently placed in Document Libraries on dedicated SharePoint Online team sites for each department.
Out of the box, Dynamics 365 will point to a single SPO site and also offer to create folders manually, however in my case, the departments are isolated and their records need to point to different sites and document libraries. What do you recommend for this scenario? I thought about using a workflow, that will based on business unit, create the correct reference to the Dynamics 365 SharePoint entities (Documentation Location e.g.) and make sure that they point to the correct site and document library. 

Portal integration:
- All the departments have their own customers, and some of these might be interested in logging on to a Dynamics 365 Portal and create cases and view the progress. I know that a each customer is represented as a Contact record in Dynamics 365.
However, how will this work if I have multiple business units sharing a single Portal? What is your experience?

I welcome any kind of feedback so don't be shy! :)

Categories:
Portals
Customer Service
  • Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member on at
    RE: Make SharePoint and Portals run i isolation to business units

    Hello Ravi,

    thanks a million for your excellent, quick and thorough response!

    I am very glad that I was not too far away from the real path. As per your response, it seems that I have to do something custom in order for CRM to point to a different SharePoint site. I will look into it.

    Thanks!

  • Verified answer
    RaviKashyap Profile Picture
    RaviKashyap 55,410 Moderator on at
    RE: Make SharePoint and Portals run i isolation to business units

    Hi Thomas,

    I'll give it a shot.

    The basic requirements are the following:

    As you have already identified, having separate business units will work for you. You need to spend more time on thinking about the security role to manage the access.

    If the fields difference between the departments is not too much (say it only 3-5 field which gets the visibility based on department) then worth using the JavaScript, Business rule to show hide. If you have massive difference in fields & layout then you can consider having different forms based on the business units. Having separate forms will allow you to have separate JavaScript/ Business Rules (Client side) for each form. But for server side workflows/ plugins etc, you need to again check for the business unit and then use the logic accordingly.

    SharePoint Online integration:

    I have recently worked on a CRM project where we have the similar separation i.e. General BU & Admin BU. For both the BU, we haave separate site in SP. CRM is configured for both the sites and we create custom logic around folder creation based on the BU of the owner of the record. (search "auto create SP folder", you will get many references on this)

    This is from where I got reference (though I had to spend some time on making this work as per my requirements) - http://www.inogic.com/blog/2015/10/programmatically-create-folders-and-upload-files-in-sharepoint-server-2013-through-plug-inworkflow/

    Portal integration:

    I haven't configured portals for crm having multiple BU's yet but I don't think having multiple BUs will affect the portal functionalities. As you are already aware that each portal user is a contact [and each contact has its on account] so when that users logs in and create a case, those cases will be created for his own account and under the ownership of system user.  You can write a simple workflow to assign the case to the owner of the account associated to the case. 

    I hope it helps :)

     

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