The use of SharePoint to leverage business efficiency and to automate business process is rapidly expanding.  This software has been designed to run most effectively with Internet Explorer and with Microsoft operating systems.  But at PerSyst Consulting we have clients who utilize every imaginable and sometime complex IT environments.  Giving those clients the ability to leverage SharePoint within their preferred IT environment is increasingly getting easier.

With the ability to operate SharePoint from within FireFox and Safari in both the PC and Mac environments the last gaping hole to be filled was Google’s hugely popular Chrome.  But true to Google’s commitment of encouraging developers to build apps around its browser IEtab is now available.

This application extension opens an Internet Explorer window within Chrome and gives you most of the speed and functionality you would experience running the full IE on your machine. Keep an eye on Google’s apps as they are rapidly releasing solutions targeted directly at improving business effectiveness.

For those of you using Microsoft's Dynamics CRM 4.0 with integration with Outlook you may have noticed you have a CRM address book for use in sending emails.  The default settings result in this being empty and if you are wondering why you need this there are some great reasons.

When you synchronize your CRM database with Outlook while running Exchange this will move the entire database to all your devices including your phone.  If you use a Blackberry then your Blackberry Enterprise Server pushes and pulls the entire data base to and from your device.  This can be irritating if you don’t need the entire database on your phone and you are used to quickly dialing from the phones search functions.

One solution is to not synchronize the entire data base to Outlook.  This sounds reasonable until you need to send an email to someone in CRM and want to do it from Outlook because if you are like me the spell check is a very nice feature.  To help us out the savvy group over at Customer Effective Blog has posted some help.  Please take a minute to read their post and you should really subscribe to their feed.

If your CRM address book is blank like below:

Then from Outlook select the CRM menu and then Options.  In options select Address Book and make the changes you desire.  For instance you can select to match the contact records only or if you would like you may match all records owned by you or just all records.

 Please note.  This example show an address book update every 1 hours.  This is likely excessive and is different discussion. 

Don't forget to select OK for the changes to be saved and then you will need to syncronize with CRM before you will see  the address book change.

Have fun!

The group over at Advisicon have a good post on the scheduled release of Microsoft’s 2010 Office Suite.  More interesting to us is the imminent release of Project Server 2010 and SharePoint 2010.  The extended collaboration tools and integrated time/payroll ability are great steps towards cross department integration.  Many people give us strange looks as we talk about the importance these changes but they are really huge leaps in brining business process automation ability to the medium sized businesses.  Currently this type of functionality is beyond the budget of most organizations.

Be sure to check out Advisicon’s demo sites for both Project 2010 and SharePoint2010.

The use of Dynamic Worksheets and Pivot tables for automatically refreshing data from CRM into your Excel based reporting can be a handy and powerful tool.  Personally, I dread repopulating a static worksheet with data and find it is often easier to recreate the report instead.  Obviously this can be a time draining endeavor and the use of dynamics worksheets is a big help.

But what do you do if your dynamic worksheet looks like this?

If you are experiencing this view you are likely accessing a web facing CRM deployment and/or are not on the same domain as the CRM instance.  To resolve this you will need to install the Outlook Client for CRM which can be downloaded here. (Don’t forget you will need to roll this up to the current version.  First install roll-up 7 for a cumulative roll-up to that point and then the latest roll-up will be cumulative from 7).

The installation of the Outlook Client will tie you to the CRM instance and you will be able to download and refresh Dynamic Worksheets and Pivot tables from the CRM instance.