I've been through enough ERP and CRM implementations to realize that integration can be a double-edged sword. It can create some great efficiencies, but can also have unintended consequences that cause stress and strain.
A recent example of this came up in our internal implementation of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which has a really cool function called the Business Data Catalog (BDC). The BDC makes data in other line-of-business systems (financial, operational, etc.) visible and usable from within SharePoint. However, in real-world use, I've discovered an annoying unintended consequence, as follows:
We maintain a library of proposals along with other sales and marketing materials in a SharePoint document library. A good way to tie a record in our (Microsoft) CRM system to related documents (e.g., proposals) is to create a metadata field for "Account," then use the Business Data Catalog to find and populate the related account in CRM. This makes it easy to search on all documents related to a particular account and reduces the chance of a document being tied to different instances of a customer, for example: Knowledge Management, KMA, Knowledge Management, Inc., Knowledge Management Incorporated, etc.
However, the fun begins when I create an account name in MSCRM that is longer than 60 characters.
CRM lets me do this, and I can even select it in the "Account" metadata field, but the Business Data Catalog pukes when I try to save the record. It took quite a while to determine that the issue was an Account Name greater than 60 characters, because this column in the SharePoint document library is a Business Data column, and it says nowhere in its properties that it has a max number of characters.
Many other column types in SharePoint allow the user to specify the max number of characters, but they appear to be maintained somewhere under the covers for the Business Data column types. Perhaps I am not a savvy enough user to get at them through the user interface, but I suspect that they are hard-coded.
There are other examples of integration challenges, which I will try to document as they come up. The moral of the story: when creating records in your line-of-business systems that you intend to integrate to SharePoint metadata, be aware of the unintended consequences (and "undocumented features") of this integration, and test, test, test!
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