“We analyzed the development effort on our side to do something similar. We realized it would be a large development and financial investment to get at least one quarter of the functionality.”
Brian Hunsaker, Director of Application Development
About Freedom Graphic Systems
Based in Aurora, Illinois, Freedom Graphic Systems is a leading provider of one-to-one direct mail, mailing and logistics solutions.
The Challenge
With sales and business opportunities on the rise, Freedom Graphic Systems had to abandon their original spreadsheet-based processes and implement a CRM platform coupled with Office 365 and SharePoint online to store documents, as CRM storage was cripplingly expensive.
Their CRM system is used by both sales representatives to manage customer relations and the management to get insight into business opportunities and progress. With such two strictly defined user groups, they needed to enforce the clear-cut cascading permissions of Dynamics CRM in SharePoint to ensure proper access levels.
Housing seven skilled in-house developers, they considered a custom integration solution. Yet, upon analyzing the inherent costs and risks, they decided to go for an out-of-the-box expert solution.
The Solution
They chose CB Dynamics CRM – SharePoint Permissions Replicator, as it offered to fulfill all their needs out-of-the-box. Also, to minimize the risks and up-front expenses, they opted for the SaaS model, ensuring ongoing and seamless support.
The Result
“One of the biggest joys of CB Replicator was the ease of implementation. We pointed it to our CRM instance, we pointed it to our SharePoint instance. Then we let it do its job, as we expected it to. To date, we have not had any incidents. It’s never done anything that made us scratch our heads and ask ourselves ‘why did it do that?’”
This small background application constantly monitors permission changes in Dynamics CRM and precisely replicates them in SharePoint, thus ensuring correct access levels for all data items, while requiring no manual maintenance on the client side.
“The CB Replicator tool itself is not spectacular. Nothing about it is awe inspiring. There is no glitz or glamour. The spectacular thing is that we don’t have to go into it – I mean ever. It requires no ongoing maintenance on it at all. If it weren’t for this conversation, I doubt any of us would have thought about it again until it was time to renew… and then we would just renew”, Brian concludes.
Brian and his team can now rest assured that their key business documents are protected just as well as their CRM entities and focus on improving business value for their organization.