O365: The SharePoint Data Harvest
See also - Other Office 365 Posts
An earlier post on getting data into SharePoint libraries touched on the various methods of building data stores for use across the business.
The methods range from creating files, documents and data in SharePoint Lists and Libraries, importing into SharePoint Lists and Libraries and scanning into Lists and Libraries.
The importance of import and scan in this context is that valuable communication data generally has two parts -
Outwards communication - files, data and documents that are sent out
and
Inwards communication - files, data and documents that are received.
The email Issue
Let's take a look at what happens with email.
In a sales department email will often be sent from and received by an individual. A well organised salesperson will probably create folders in the inbox to sort incoming mail so that communications from customers are easily found.
But, what happens to outgoing mail?
This usually resides in the Sent Mail folder on the individuals account. Sent folders are often cleared when content reaches a certain age.
At a later date you may wish to analyse the processing of an order. The salesperson can provide the incoming record from the inbox folders, but outgoing means sorting through everything in the outbox, some of which may already have bee deleted.
Enter the CRM
When seeking a solution to such common problems a business will often be advised to take on a CRM package.
These come in all shapes and sizes from free-ware to very extensive and expensive software suites.
One thing they all have in common is that for successful deployment users will all be required to store their data in one place and will all be required to store their data in a format acceptable to the CRM.
In return the CRM will deliver lots of out-of-the-box forms and reports on what is happening across the sales business, who in the business owns responsibility for what and what the work load balance is across the business.
In order to achieve this the CRM will need feeding with data. Incoming and outgoing email, incoming and outgoing paper documents and incoming and outgoing electronic documents, such as email attachments and Internet downloads.
In short the CRM will teach data discipline and require data discipline across the organisation.
All well and good.
Where Does Office 365 Come in?
As already discussed, Office 365 delivers the functionality to create communications data directly from a SharePoint List or a SharePoint Library, offers extensive tools to import and scan communications data directly into Lists and Libraries. It also offers the functions of group or team email and facilitates the capture of incoming and outgoing email content directly into the List and Library structure.
Once the data is stored within the Office 365 domain it is simple, using the powerful search tools to locate, list and categorise in order to allow for organisation wide dissemination of information and analysis of performance.
Does that Mean Office 365 is a CRM?
Not really, it is in fact an organisation Content Management System, that can be easily and without programming skills be made to perform the functions of a CRM.
Additional factors are that use of a CRM external to Office 365 requires manual or automated interaction between the two data repositories.
Users need to learn two systems.
There is an update latency between the two systems.
All of that scanning and importing. Doesn't that mean a lot more work?
Yes it does. So, how you organise that work could mean the difference between a system that works for you and a system that is just another dysfunctional electronic filing system.
Getting paper documents into a system has always been a bottle neck. In the past field workers would collect invoices and receipts from their travels and sort and file them on return to the office.
Paper communications would come through the post and be sorted and placed on the desks of the addressee.
The Office 365 One Drive app for Android and IoS helps resolve this as you can photo scan any document, receipt or invoice as soon as it comes into your hand. This can be filed as a PDF directly into the SharePoint Library where it is required
You can also use any other scanning device to achieve the same result.
email attachments and downloaded files and documents can be quickly filed in similar fashion, as can the content of email exchanges.
In addition a simple Power Automate flow can capture the To and From fields and the body portion of any email to SharePoint Lists.
All The Data you Need
This is not to say that no organisation ever needs an external CRM. Just that, if you chose a CRM, or any other business software application, it needs to fit comfortably within your organisational information storage strategy.
Data duplication should be avoided where possible with the primary system being where addition, removal and update of data should take place. Sub systems should be fed from the primary system.
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