Creating a New CRM Record as you Profile a Document

We’ve all been there – you are in Outlook (or Word or Excel) saving a document to your document management store and you are prompted for metadata – including the Client / Project to which the document relates. This should be easy because the metadata capture / profiling dialog lets you pick a Client / Project from a drop down list that is populated from the main CRM system. Unfortunately this is a new Project so there is no record yet created in the CRM and so nothing to pick. You have to jump out into the CRM system and find the Client and create a new Project for that Client, then go back into Outlook (or Word or Excel) and complete the save.

A much more end-user friendly approach would be to be able to click a New button on the profiling dialog which lets you capture details for the new project and create that project in the CRM system. In other words create the new project as part of saving the first document for that project.

The good news for folks wanting to save documents in a Microsoft SharePoint document store is that the MacroView DMF profiling (metadata capture) dialog enables such an approach. The MacroView Professional Services team customised the profiling for a Member Matter column so that the user sees drop down picker and also a + icon, which they can click to create a new Member Matter (effectively a new Client Project) on the fly in an external Line of Business system. Once created, the brand new Matter is then automatically selected as the value of Member Matter.

Clicking the + icon brings up a sub-dialog so that you can capture details for a new Matter. When you click the OK in that sub-dialog, the new Matter is created in the external LOB system.

User feedback has been excellent – this new facility is really saving time and reducing frustration. Users no longer need to jump out to the Member Matter system to create new Matters before they attempt to save documents or emails for that Matter.

From an IT perspective the custom profiling for the column requires the deployment of a custom client-side assembly. MacroView developed the .Net code in that assembly to call methods in a custom web service, which retrieves and stores data in the database for the Member Matter system.

Going forward, the profiling dialog will continue to function correctly as other columns are added to document libraries within the organisation’s SharePoint environment. MacroView DMF generates the profiling dialog dynamically, handling all types of metadata column. If it encounters a Member Matter column, MacroView DMF displays the custom profiling experience shown in the screen shot.

See also Integrating Your Line Of Business System With MacroView DMF.