Here at Altriva, like many other organizations, we use CRM for many of our core business processes and use SharePoint for our intranet, document management, and enterprise search. With these two platforms being vital to many of our overall processes we have integrated the two applications. Having also solved this problem for many of our clients, we know how common it is for organizations to use CRM and SharePoint in similar capacities. As a result we felt it would be valuable to share our insight and integration approach.

There are many instances where businesses want multiple "owners" of something within CRM. Having multiple users own something comes in many different forms when related to CRM. Examples include team selling using CRM Opportunity records, team support using Cases, and Tasks assigned to a group. Microsoft CRM is constructed such that one user is the "owner" of each record within CRM. Can we alter the system to modify this ownership?

This past month a few questions were asked in the CRM newsgroup and forums about how to trigger reminders off of dates within Microsoft CRM. I thought this would be a good discussion topic to discuss the options along with some Pros and Cons of each option. A few examples of the questions we have seen are: "Let's say I want to be notified 3 days in advance about birth dates of all the contacts in the system" "I want a reminder sent to the owner of a case 3 days before the due date of the case" "Is there a way to send a note to a manager if a case is untouched after 4 hours"

We have brought up synchronous and asynchronous processing multiple times throughout previous posts thus far related to Custom Workflow Assemblies and Plug-ins in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. The next section will cover in more detail the business and technical impacts of both types of event registration within the Execution Pipeline.

Today's "CRM Success" blog entry will focus on when to use Workflows with Custom Workflow Activities (AKA Workflow Assemblies) and when to use Plug-ins when registering .NET assemblies to help facilitate business processes in CRM.