Why you should consider using SharePoint as your Salesforce Secondary File Storage
Last Updated: September 22, 2023 In today’s world of digitalization, businesses often find different strategic methods to improve their customer relationships & data management process. In the pursuit to achieve these goals, companies adopt multiple technology platforms. Salesforce is one such innovative platform that enterprises use to manage their sales, service, and marketing processes in order to optimize marketing campaigns, maximize lead acquisitions, minimize sales cycles, deliver top-grade customer service, and maintain long-term customer relationships. With a growing business, every enterprise encounters faster data growth, and managing a large volume of data efficiently is becoming a key differentiator. When you have a big team operating from multiple locations, managing critical business information with easy access and seamless collaboration often becomes cumbersome. Salesforce as a platform can significantly accelerate sales & boost customer service workflows. However, when it comes to document management, there are certain limitations as this is not a part of Salesforce’s core capabilities. In order to optimize their document management process & get the best results, enterprises usually look for alternative platforms that can help them accomplish this. And what can be better than SharePoint? Understanding SharePoint SharePoint is one of the leading document management & storage platforms. Powered by Microsoft, SharePoint offers organizations an advanced, highly configurable, and relatively cost-effective document storage & collaboration platform. Through its cloud-based application SharePoint Online, & the in-house application SharePoint On-premise, SharePoint has a user base of over 100 million worldwide. Top 5 Benefits of SharePoint for Document Management Managing documents using SharePoint is a smart choice considering the powerful capabilities of the tool. SharePoint can easily make your entire document management process automated, organized, and efficient. Let’s have a look at the top 5 benefits of using SharePoint for document management. Collaboration A large number of users can collaborate on single or multiple documents at the same time with ease. This is one of the most popular SharePoint features. Collaboration helps faster turnarounds & increased productivity. Flexibility SharePoint offers one of the most flexible & configurable platforms. The tool can be easily integrated with any external system & businesses can also customize it as per their business requirements. Security Microsoft has properly taken care of the security aspect of this tool. Documents can be stored safely with access controls, view restrictions, and robust servers. Version Control SharePoint’s file versioning capability allows the admin or owner to maintain a proper version history in an easily accessible location. This is very much required when a large number of users collaborate on files as every change is captured & saved separately with an audit trail. This makes SharePoint secure also. Better Accessibility & Easy Retrievals SharePoint offers seamless accessibility to the files through an easy-to-use UI along with a modern search feature. Users can find files easily with a faster retrieval process. Also Read: Document Management in Salesforce: A Brief Introduction to its Best Practices SharePoint for Salesforce Document Management As we already mentioned in this blog, Salesforce is not built for document management as it is not coming under its core purpose, just like SharePoint can not manage customer relationships. Both platforms are built for different business objectives & integrating both will do wonders for a business. Joint customers of Salesforce & SharePoint can leverage both these platforms to transform two of their most critical business processes i.e. running business processes such as sales, marketing, and service on Salesforce by managing all the business information on SharePoint. This integration makes more sense as Salesforce offers minimum storage to keep files, while SharePoint can manage massive volumes of files with ease & also in a highly cost-effective way. Benefits of using SharePoint to Store Salesforce Files Integrating Salesforce & SharePoint offers a plethora of benefits for the joint customers. Customers can have a powerful integrated CRM & Document Management System, which allows them to manage their sales, and service processes better while keeping all the files in a centralized location. Let’s have a look at some of the key benefits of connecting Salesforce with SharePoint. Cost Savings As you might know, Salesforce allows a limited volume of files (10 GB) to be stored in its system & every time customers go for storage upgrades, this results in high additional costs. Storing Salesforce files in SharePoint will definitely reduce massive storage costs & sales/service agents can work more efficiently without facing storage or performance issues. SharePoint offers 1TB of storage space excluding 10GB storage per license purchased. Managing Large Size Files SharePoint can manage large-size files with ease (50 MB) which is a big challenge in Salesforce. So, Salesforce users can upload files of larger sizes & experience hassle-free document management. Better File Collaboration SharePoint is favorably popular for its robust document collaboration capabilities. Moving Salesforce files to SharePoint will allow users to collaborate on files without any crises. Organized File System As Salesforce doesn’t offer any kind of folder structure to keep files, moving documents to SharePoint allows customers to organize files under specific folders as folders can be created in SharePoint. This will improve user experience as well as file accessibility. Better Document Management As Salesforce is not a document management system, when integrated with SharePoint, all the SharePoint document management features can be applicable to Salesforce files as well. This includes versioning, access control, unified search, document approvals, sharing, etc. This definitely allows Salesforce users to leverage a world-class document management system. How to Integrate Salesforce with SharePoint for Document Management? There are multiple ways to integrate both Salesforce & SharePoint for document management. However, most of the organizations adopt one method among the below three. Files Connect Custom Application AppExchange Application Salesforce Files Connect can be used to set up an integration between both platforms. However, this has certain limitations in terms of features & functionalities. Building a custom app in-house can do the job, however, this can be expensive and time-consuming. Custom applications will never give you capabilities beyond basic requirements. The third option is finding a ready-to-use
Salesforce-SharePoint Integration – How to Transform your Salesforce File Storage Needs
With the advent of new companies in the technology landscape, the competition in one’s industry has increased exponentially. When various other companies also provide similar kinds of solutions & services to customers, enterprises must maintain an edge over their competitors by continuing to offer the best quality services to their end-users. For this purpose, enterprises turn towards automated solutions that can efficiently handle their business procedures. One such automation solution is the world’s #1 cloud CRM platform, Salesforce. Its valuable services across different departments like marketing, sales, customer service, finance, etc make it the most trusted platform among enterprises. When enterprises can generate more leads, make better-informed decisions & drive forth success, what more will they need, right? But that’s not the case over here! One major issue with Salesforce is the limited nature of its primary file storage space which is fine until the voluminous files generated in the process of managing the customers’ information are not brought into the picture. And then there is also the high additional file storage cost, which is a challenge in itself. Thankfully, being a customer-friendly platform, Salesforce can be easily integrated with different external storage to handle this issue with file storage limitations. SharePoint: A Reliable Salesforce File Storage Option One such viable secondary storage option is SharePoint. SharePoint is one of the most popular document management and storage platforms today with over 200 million monthly users worldwide. Being used by a huge chunk of Fortune 500 companies, SharePoint offers storage, retrieval, searching, archiving, tracking, management, and reporting of electronic documents and records regarding any customer. Owing to such features, Salesforce can be easily integrated with SharePoint which enhances its collaboration & document management capabilities. Some of the primary reasons to choose the Salesforce-SharePoint collaboration for your business growth are: Cost Efficiency– In contrast to opting for more Salesforce licenses to increase document management capabilities (which is a costly option), an enterprise can simply choose SharePoint-based collaboration where full-fledged collaboration among large cross-departmental teams will cost less. Cross-departmental collaboration– Even though Salesforce was intended for multiple departments like sales & marketing, several colleagues collaborating on a single project proves to be extremely challenging. Using the SharePoint employees company-wide can connect, promoting & letting them engage in cross-departmental collaboration. Document Versioning– SharePoint also allows real-time co-authoring and offline work with documents with greater data storage limits. It automatically tracks changes and maintains a history of document versions, enabling users to revert to previous versions if needed. This makes sure everyone is working on the updated version of the document. Centralized Document Management– SharePoint serves as a single hub for all your documents. Instead of juggling multiple locations and handling version conflicts, all your Salesforce files are stored in one well-organized place. This makes it easier to find and manage your documents without the hassle of scattered folders. Setting Up Salesforce-SharePoint Collaboration When you have decided to set up a seamless collaboration between your Salesforce system & SharePoint storage, there’s just the question of how to do that. For this purpose, there are several means through which the Salesforce-SharePoint integration can be established. These range from ready-made tools to the ones built from scratch. A standard list of possible integration tools includes: Salesforce Files Connect– Offered by Salesforce itself, the Salesforce Files Connect framework allows users to access, search, and share Salesforce files stored in external sources in real time & allows Salesforce admins to set up the integration themselves with simple point-and-click tools. It can also be configured to take into account SharePoint’s custom properties like custom columns, custom content type, & metadata from Office 365 documents during Search, SOQL, and SOSL Queries which allows simultaneous search results for a particular file in both Salesforce & SharePoint. The only downside is that this solution is rather pricey. Custom-built integration applications– This is a very flexible option since such applications can be designed in line with specific requirements and can address a need for multiple integrations, without exceeding the costs. However, it is important to mention that the internal Salesforce administrator might not be able to build the custom integration app himself so it becomes imperative to seek external help, which adds to the cost. Salesforce AppExchange integration applications– There are several options available on the AppExchange that can be installed by the Salesforce admin. In case further features are required, such apps can nearly always be modified by the Salesforce developer. WEBINAR ALERT: Integrate SharePoint & Salesforce using XfilesPro – An Advanced File Management & Collaboration Solution for Salesforce XfilesPro: Your Salesforce File Management Partner One such AppExchange application that can help enterprises seamlessly store and collaborate files with SharePoint is XfilesPro. XfilesPro is a highly customizable, admin-friendly application that performs exceptionally well with several Salesforce solutions like Service Cloud, Community/Experience Cloud, Sales Cloud, & Salesforce Platform. With XfilesPro, Salesforce customers can not only significantly reduce their file storage costs but can also seamlessly enable 360-degree file collaboration, including integration with various external storages like SharePoint. XfilesPro has leveraged the capabilities of SharePoint to the fullest. The tagging feature of SharePoint helps users access files faster, while the multisite feature allows for seamless management of interconnected sites, making it easier to collaborate across different teams and departments. To get more details on why Salesforce admins prefer Sharepoint as their external cloud storage platform, read the blog. In addition to SharePoint, XfilesPro can also be used to collaborate the Salesforce system with various other external file storage systems. These include Cloud-based storage systems like OneDrive, Amazon S3, Google Drive, & Dropbox. As the world goes digital, document management is evolving too. Enter XfilesPro’s DocuPrime, a game-changer in the document management cycle. This app simplifies and streamlines the document generation process, from template creation and approval to obtaining e-signatures. By leveraging the capabilities of SharePoint and DocuPrime, you can eliminate paperwork hassles and elevate your document management. To know more about XfilesPro and how it can facilitate Salesforce-SharePoint integration and document generation all within a
