SharePoint and Power Automate Development

Structure

Flexibility

CRM: You purchase Dynamics for a particular role, whether Sales, Marketing or Customer Service (or all 3) they can be customised, but you usually end up with a lot of new forms and fields that you do not utilise or use.

SharePoint: Completely customisable, you start with a blank slate and the CRM or any other system you build in it is entirely bespoke to you and your business needs. You can also add extra functionality later if you wish.

Security Metrics

CRM: We can apply field level securities in entity forms. Talking about roles, users can be divided into business units, territories, teams.

SharePoint: All items have their possible permission levels; you use groups to define the permissions users should have; you can also use ‘define permission’ directly on users if necessary. You can also dynamically change the permissions on items if needed.

Workflows

CRM: A dynamics CRM workflow can trigger on events like create, update, field change, etc.

SharePoint: Workflows here do not run on field change events for list items, but can run on creating/update events, within the workflow you can check for field changes. Additionally, you extend SharePoint workflows to be able to communicate with other systems (e.g. Invoicing [Xero], email marketing services [Mailchimp/Active Campaign]). With the addition of Power Automate, you can extend the capabilities even further.

Document Management System

CRM: Dynamics CRM isn’t designed for these features. We can only upload documents as attachments to the notes on an entity.

SharePoint: Provides a robust document management system as a document library. Documents can be linked to multiple entities, whether a Client, contact, event or all 3.

Cost

CRM: Microsoft Dynamics can cost anything between £37 per user per month to £250 per app, depending on what you want Dynamics to do.

SharePoint: SharePoint is included with most Office 365 packages and can be brought separately for less than £5 per user per month, to get the similar (and more) functionality of Dynamics, you would be looking at around £40 per user per month.

Microsoft Dynamics (CRM)

Microsoft SharePoint