"Dogfooding" Business Data Catalog

Our firm recently began using the new Business Data Catalog product to connect data in our Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 intranet portal to our other line of business systems.  We began with a system that I use every day, Microsoft's Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

As I've written about before, the Business Data Catalog is a new component of MOSS 2007 that provides connectors for better integration between line-of-business systems and MOSS.  KMA is using it to associate proposals and other opportunity or account-specific documents in our marketing document library with accounts and opportunities stored in our CRM system, and organize them accordingly.

The first picture shown here reflects the fields we connected:  account and opportunity (note the arrows), and below, owner.  We use this MOSS Document Library to show our sales and marketing data in specific views, for example:

• all documents sorted by type (proposal, presentation, etc.)
• all proposals related to a particular technology (SQL Server or SharePoint, for example)
• all documents sorted by owner
• all documents related to a particular opportunity, etc.
• all documents sorted by account

Note:  the last three views above are based on data that live in CRM, and are validated when I enter them (or select them) in SharePoint via "Object Picker" fields (see the arrows above).  Also, it should be noted that the queries that control what accounts or opportunities I can select can be edited, so you can limit (for example) the accounts you can pick from to only those with active opportunities, etc.  Additional info is available at MSDN.  [geek warning -- fairly technical content, at least for a non-programmer]

This tool and this connectedness helps provide KMA with an easily maintained and highly searchable library of sales and marketing documents, and makes finding the data I am looking for very easy.  I recommend looking into ways to take advantage of Business Data Catalog when planning to implement MOSS 2007.

Next week:  using the "business bar" to populate SharePoint metadata and publish to a document library from directly within the Office 2007 applications:  Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.