Publish Your Microsoft Dynamics SL Documents to a SharePoint Site

Updated: January 5, 2005

By Scott Tucker

Scott Tucker

Did you know that with very little effort you can publish your Microsoft Dynamics SL documents to Microsoft Windows SharePoint Server? Did you also know you can do this from within Microsoft Dynamics SL?

Two features make publishing Microsoft Dynamics SL documents to a SharePoint site possible:

•	When you install Microsoft Office 2003, you get a new printer—the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer printer.
•	Microsoft Windows XP lets you map a network drive to any part of a Windows SharePoint site.

System Requirements

To publish your Microsoft Dynamics SL documents to a SharePoint site, you need to be running the following applications:

•	Microsoft Solomon version 5.5 or 6.0
•	Microsoft Office 2003
•	Microsoft Windows SharePoint Server
•	Microsoft Window XP

Top of page

System Configuration

To set up your Microsoft Dynamics SL documents for publication to a SharePoint site, perform the following steps:

1.	Map a drive to your Windows SharePoint Server root site, or have your organization’s IT pro do it for you. Note that you only have to do this once.
2.	Set up a separate sub-site for each of your customers. This allows you to maintain separate security for each customer. For more information on setting up sub-sites, refer to Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Help.
3.	In each customer's Windows SharePoint Server site, create a document library named Invoices and an e-mail alert on the document library for the customer contact.

Top of page

How the User Experience Looks

Suppose it's the 15th of the month and all your invoices have to go out. Follow these simple steps, and you’re all set:

1.	Log in to Microsoft Dynamics SL and change your printer to the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer printer.
2.	Print out a list of Approved Invoices (report BI430).
3.	Open the Invoice Print screen (BI.INV.00) in the Flexible Billings module. Select the entire range of invoices to print. As each invoice prints, the File Save As dialog box will open.
4.	Choose the mapped drive (for example, the S drive) and pick the customer and invoice subdirectory (for example, S:\C315\Invoices). Then name the file with the draft number. The invoices will print in the same order as they are listed on the BI430 report.

If your customers have already subscribed to document additions to these document libraries, they will automatically receive an e-mail message containing a direct link to their invoice. This makes for a great customer experience. Plus, you’ll get your invoices into your customer's inbox—without paying postage!—by noon on the 15th of the month. Try it yourself. It's pretty cool.

In addition, you can use this same technique for any document you want to share with a customer or vendor. Just remember to follow these steps:

1.	Create a SharePoint site.
2.	Configure e-mail alerts on the document library.
3.	Map a drive to the SharePoint site or directly to the document library.
4.	In Microsoft Dynamics SL, select Print To File and save your document to the new drive.

Scott Tucker is a software development lead with Microsoft Dynamics SL. He has worked with the product for more than 10 years. He works in Redmond, WA in the United States.

Top of page

Helpful Links

•	Microsoft Dynamics SL Newsgroup
•	Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Home Page
•	Integrate Microsoft Dynamics SL with Microsoft Office

Was this information useful?