Managing Sales Documents in MS-CRM

One of the most common questions we get from users is how to store sales and service documents in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. These documents could be sales related like quotes, work orders, purchase requests, proposals, etc or service related like field service reports, error logs, or other documentation related to a case.

The answer to the questions, of course, is the often missed upload attachment feature .
Unfortunately this feature does not work for most Microsoft Dynamics CRM document storage needs, for the following reasons.

1. There is no version control or document management features.
2. There is no ability to search the text of documents that are stored
3. The documents uploaded are stored in the notes section and not visible when browsing the record and it is often not intuitive to look in the notes section for documents.
4. The attach document icon (the paperclip) is placed in the form header, not where people think to look to upload documents.
   

Further storing documents in MS-CRM will bloat the Microsoft Dynamics CRM database causing serious performance problems.

A better solution is to leverage Microsoft SharePoint for document management within Dynamics CRM. In this way, you get all of the document management features of SharePoint without leaving CRM. Statera offers Stratus, a web based MS-CRM and Sharepoint integration platform to do this for you.


Stratus takes a few minutes to setup and is currently available for free from stratus.statera.com.