Microsoft Teams and your CRM system

To end February I am travelling up to Glasgow for Scottish Summit, a large community event focussing on Dynamics, PowerPlatform and Office 365. My session will be exploring the integration between Dynamics 365 CE and Microsoft Teams. Document collaboration for Dynamics is something I have been speaking and writing about for several years. It will be an interesting experience taking the relatively new topic of Teams integration for Dynamics, to a new event for me.

More broadly, at ProvisionPoint we are often asked about provisioning solutions integrated with CRM systems. Whether that be Dynamics, Salesforce, Zoho or the myriad of smaller cloud offerings. The reason, I believe, for the frequency of this request is that for many organisations the architecture in Teams aligns with records which exist in a CRM system. Perhaps the most common is the customer record in CRM, which often maps neatly to an associated Team. However, Teams could also be created in a structure which aligns with other CRM records, including Opportunities, Suppliers and Projects.

Provisioning Teams

So what has this got to do with provisioning? Quite frankly it makes sense that at a certain point in a customer journey a new Team is created. It will enable relevant resources to manage all documentation, conversations and other information for that customer. People can be engaged in the Team who do not necessarily have access to the CRM system, including representatives from the customer. It also makes sense that the CRM system triggers the creation of the Team because any well deployed CRM should manage the end to end customer journey.

There are of course many technical benefits for your CRM system to drive the provisioning of a new Team. These include applying naming conventions, configuring defined structures in the Team and even defining Team membership. Furthermore, the new Team can be configured to display information from the CRM system, whether that be through data visualisation or pre-built apps.

The value of CRM and Teams

CRM systems have long been central to the way organisations work, and I am increasingly seeing the same with Microsoft Teams. It is therefore fairly obvious that driving Teams creation from a CRM system is a solution which delivers benefits to many organisations.