Based on the success of our Power User cookbook, my company is launching a new SharePoint 2010 training business. We need a simple CRM application to help us keep track of it. We want to maintain a list of customers, a calendar of our public training courses, be able to quickly respond to course enquiries, track our customers' orders, and invoices for training places. We need some simple reports and charts that quickly give us an overall picture of how the training business is performing.

Building on the previous recipe, we again create a custom SharePoint 2010 Team Site as the starting point of our solution. In this case, we add and customize a contacts list to track the details of our training course customers. We use the calendar list to record the public schedules of the courses we intend to present. We remove the Shared Documents library that was created automatically and replace it with two new document libraries designed to store sales resources and customer documents respectively.

The Sales resources library is used to store course information, company fliers, and other sales documents that we want to be able to quickly send out to customers in response to course enquiries.

The customer documents library is used to store the documentation related to existing customers. We create add content types for customer documents such as quotations, orders, and invoices, allowing us to capture different metadata for each document type. Our documents are generated in Word and uploaded to the library. We create a lookup field in each content type that links the documents to our customer list. We add a new web part page to the site and use connected web parts to give us a filtered view showing each customer's documents.

This recipe works for:

This composite application combines a custom Team Site, content types, and connected web parts to create a powerful yet simple CRM application.

The sales process starts when an enquiry is received from a potential training course customer. An initial e-mail response can quickly be produced using Outlook 2010. Because the course schedule calendar and the Sales Resources document library from the site can be connected to Outlook 2010, all the information required to craft an appropriate response is automatically synchronized and readily available. Course outlines and company information can be easily dragged and dropped into the outgoing e-mails.

Positive enquiry responses can be converted into formal quotations, orders, and invoices. This application makes use of content types to allow all these different types of customer documents to be stored in the same document library, whilst at the same time employing different document templates, capturing different metadata, applying different workflows, and so on. Content types allow composite applications to successfully model and manage these real world entities. You should seek to employ them wherever possible.

New invoices, orders, and quotations can be quickly generated in Microsoft Word 2010 by using the templates saved to their corresponding content type. The metadata required is prompted for and can be entered directly within the document information panel within Word documents themselves.

The content type in this application ensures that sales documents are captured in a structured way. Each content type has a lookup column on the customers' list, allowing all sales documents to be related back to their parent customer. This fact is exploited in the Customer View web part page to create a customer dashboard showing filtered views of selected customer's documents. The page makes use of web part connections to filter the custom Quotations, Orders, and Invoices views on the customer's documents list based on the value selected in the customers' list displayed on the page. All this magic happens through a few mouse clicks and a simple wizard; no code required. Web part connections are a great feature for building composite applications.

Finally, when it comes to analyzing our sales performance, all we need to do is select the view on the customer documents library we want and hit the Export to Excel button on the Library tab of the List Tools ribbon. From there we can analyze our sales data using Excel charts, pivot tables, and reports that allow us to present the data however we choose.

The recipe reinforces the concept that a Team Site makes a great starting point for many composite applications.

In this case, we see the power of content types and how the use of content types helps us store quotation, orders, and invoice documents in the same document list, allowing us to capture different metadata and apply different business rules and workflows for each different document types.

We have learnt how to use web part connections to create connected views of business data, allowing us to quickly view all the customer documents for an individual customer, while at the same time using the summary fields of SharePoint views to automatically display the total values of quotes, orders, and invoices.

The narrative surrounding this recipe is designed to remind you that SharePoint is only one of many tools that you have at your disposal when creating composite applications. It is best used in conjunction with the Office applications such as Word, Excel, and Outlook 2010.

There are an almost infinite number of ways that this composite application could be extended. A lookup column could be added to the invoice column to allow the invoices to be related back to orders as well as customers, creating a master/detail view of this data. Meeting workspaces could be used in the calendar to plan each course instance (storing details such as the trainer, location, attendees, and so on). Custom declarative workflows could be attached to each of the content types to perform sales pipeline functionality such as creating tasks to follow up a quote a week after it was sent out or chasing up a customer invoice when it is overdue. The task list could be modified to include a customer lookup and the tasks for a particular customer added to the Customer View page. More views could be added to the customer documents library using more advanced filter criteria such as combining the content type, due date, and invoice status column to create an overdue invoice view and so on.