Office 365 subscribers get more than just Office apps and email; here is how to use SharePoint to build your own basic customer management tool.

CRM – or Customer Relationship Management – is an important business software system. It is here you record all your customer details, the contacts who you deal with at those customers, and your history of interactions with these customers and contacts.

This latter point cannot be underestimated – by management, at least. Your sales team are communicating with your customers (or should be) constantly, and unless they record this in your software that intelligence and history is potentially lost when an employee leaves. With a good CRM you can have other staff take over the duties of another – even if that person is simply away on holidays or is unwell – without interruption because they know, at a glance, the status of that account. They know the customer called to enquire on pricing, or discussed their own expected business growth or contraction.

Using a CRM tool a business can automate the calculation of key performance indicators (KPI). I have worked in companies where management asked its accounts team to fill in a weekly spreadsheet recording how many sales calls and visits each person made that week. Yet, there was no evidence to back it up. An individual could state they made 100 sales calls but yet because the business did not enforce the data entry of calls this information was unverifiable. Worse, if a salesperson left, there was no possible way another team member could advance any work already performed because there was simply no record made.

It is a convenient, and common, excuse that data entry takes too much time, but it really is a business imperative. I believe in the mantra that if an event or activity is not recorded in the business system then it did not happen.

Nevertheless, that is all a topic for a different time. Let’s say your company has decided it needs a CRM. As always, choices are buy or build. There are many off-the-shelf CRM systems with price tags from not a lot to definitely a lot.

If you are using Microsoft’s Office 365 then chances are you have Microsoft SharePoint 2013 hosted for you, whether you are using it or not. Yet, without much effort or coding, you can build your own CRM system. You gain immediate benefit from having free web hosting, an application and data storage framework, and authentication based on your existing Office365 user accounts.

Let’s do it.

First, as always, open the Office 365 portal and login. Click the Admin drop-down menu, then SharePoint. If you do not see the Admin menu make sure you are logging in with an account that has administrative rights. If you do not see the SharePoint menu then check your Office 365 subscription includes SharePoint.

The SharePoint admin center will be displayed. Click New / Private Site Collection to make a new web app.

You will be prompted to specify a web site address; by default this will be of the form <company name>.sharepoint.com/sites/<site name> where you specify the site name (eg crm). You can also use a custom address, such as crm.companyname.com. For this to work you will need to ensure that address is defined with the rest of your domain’s DNS, plus inside Office 365.

You will also be prompted to specify a storage quota and a server resource quota. The storage quote is self-explanatory, this is how much disk space you will devote to your new application, and is limited by the amount of storage you have (25Gb by default). If your CRM becomes a resounding success you can purchase more storage.

The server resource quota is something that may be unclear, but fundamentally is a metric calculated by SharePoint. The driving purpose is to limit the risk that custom code can have on your site’s availability. By spreading the available quota across all your web site apps (should you make more than one) you can ensure one SharePoint site does not dominate all the others, should a program bug cause excessive CPU usage, for example.

Once you have made your site, and know the address, download and install SharePoint Designer 2013. This is under the Office 365 Settings / Software / Tools & Add-ins menu within Office 365, near where you download the Office 2013 apps themselves.

The SharePoint Designer gives you a great deal of control over your SharePoint site, using an interface which can often be less troublesome. It continually synchronises your changes with SharePoint online so you can freely switch from the SharePoint Designer to the SharePoint web site, or collaborate with others.

Within SharePoint Designer open your website, by using the address you defined earlier. If prompted to login use your Office 365 credentials.

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On the left-hand side of SharePoint Designer is a navigation pane. Click the top item, which will be the name of your CRM app as entered by you. You can manage general settings here. Ensure the box “Display Quick Launch” is checked, as this provides a handy navigation list for your app.

Note too the Permissions section; this is what controls who can use and work with your site. Right-click the groups – members, owners, visitors – as relevant, and select Properties, to add specific users. You can future-proof your site somewhat by using groups like “Everyone except external users”. This means all of your Office 365 users can automatically have access to your CRM, both existing and future users.

In the navigation list click ‘Site Pages’. Your site does not yet have any pages yet, but it will need at least one. Click the ‘Web Part Page’ dropdown and select a layout. Enter a page name, such as ‘home’ or ‘default’. Click your page once to select it, then click ‘Set as Home Page’. If you like, use ‘Preview in Browser’ to see your site as it exists now. It’s not much, because there is no content to speak of, but you can see the page address is live and active. This is the page you will direct your users to when ready.

Now for a very important step. Click the ‘Lists and Libraries’ option in the navigation page. Here you will create Custom Lists to define the data you want to store in your CRM.

Logically, two lists you will want to make are Clients (or Customers, whatever your terminology is) and Contacts.

For Clients, enter appropriate fields and data types, such as ‘Name’ (single line of text), website (hyperlink), address (multiple lines of text), city, state (choice, then specifying the values to use), state, postcode, phone, fax and so on.

For Contacts, again enter appropriate fields and data types. This will include the contact’s name, email address, phone number and the like. You will also want to make a field to record the company they work for; specify this as data type “Lookup (information already on this site)” and link the contact to the client list.

As you work through the list be sure to specify an appropriate data type for each field, and whether each field should be mandatory. Add other fields as necessary for your application and business. You might want to record contact’s birthdays, spouse and children names, favourite beverage, and whatever else you need to store.

Open your page again now in a web browser and you should find the quick navigation area shows the two lists you have just created.

In a similar fashion, create a Diary Note list. Include a mandatory lookup to your contact list. Add a date field, with a default value of the current day and time. Ensure the field is set to include time as well as date. Add a field for free-text notes, and also add a field for the category of the diary note, specifying a choice. Add values here that make sense for your business, such as “sales call”, “site visit”, “order” and so forth.

You should now feel reasonably comfortable inside the SharePoint Designer, and also with opening your site to see how it changes as you add lists and change settings. Explore the SharePoint Designer to see how else you can customise your site.

Let’s make sure you also know how to work within the SharePoint 2013 online site administration facilities. Open your site. As you are an administrator you will have “Browse” and “Page” menus. Click “Page” then “Edit Page”. This allows you to make use of the web part layout you specified earlier.

In the ‘body’ region, click ‘Add web part’. Browse and select one of your lists, adding it to the page. Click ‘Stop Editing’. In addition to the quick launch on the side, your SharePoint site now displays a list of clients on the home page. Your users can click to add clients, or click on existing clients (if there were any) to view all their details, or click on column headings to sort. Add one or more new items now so you can test it out.

While on the SharePoint web site click the Office 365 cog icon in the top-right of the page, next to your photo. Click ‘Site Settings’ and here you can will find all the options to manage your SharePoint site outside of the SharePoint Designer. Click ‘Title, description, and logo’ and upload a logo so it replaces the default SharePoint image. Next experiment with ‘Change the look’ to apply a theme.

You now have the basics of a CRM site which your users can start working with immediately. You will want to add refinements as you work with it, changing the order of fields, adding more fields, setting and unsetting mandatory fields, and creating and managing lookups, but fundamentally you can achieve these through the SharePoint administration site and through SharePoint Designer. By using SharePoint, included in your Office 365 subscription, you have achieved this without spending any money on web hosting or storage, and without writing any code to manage the database, or the display and editing of data.