Hi All
Background
I’m new to implementing SharePoint – I’ve used WSS 2003 and MOSS and understand the fundamentals (as I see it). Now I’ve landed in a small company that want me to fix their struggling 2013 online implementation. I have Global Admin rights and have set myself up with SharePoint Designer. I haven’t used Power Shell before
I am having a rake of issues that I’ll list one at a time by urgency. Maybe this can be a resource to help others in my situation
Issue – Customer metadata field
I am about to create Content Types but need to create the basic Site Columns and Business Connectivity elements. I have created some Managed Metadata elements and Site Columns. I want to make Customer available but I expect we will more to a CRM app some time in the future so I guess I should create an external data source – even in MS Excel (or possibly internally as a list) and map customer name so that we can remap it when we need to.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Is this the way to go?
Thanks is advance
Ian
You could create an external data source for Customers and surface it in SharePoint using a business data column, or a lookup from an external list. However, I think you’ll have difficulty preserving the values of your Customer fields when you change the back-end data source, as the underlying IDs for each external data item will change. As such, I’m not sure there’s any advantage in using an external data source at this stage. I’d look at one of the following approaches:
- Create a managed metadata term set for your customers, and add an MMS column to your content types.
- Create a regular SharePoint list for your customers, and add a lookup column to your content types.
When you come to deploy a CRM solution, you’ll need to take a fresh look at your integration requirements – e.g. add new business data columns to your content types, find a way of migrating data, etc. But I don’t think there’s much you can do now to lessen the integration effort further down the line.
