We've shown you how to store and access electronic documents that are used to present products or services to potential customers using the sales literature feature in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The common use case assumes that the documents will be stored in and accessed from the master sales literature library in CRM where they will likely be used repeatedly to market specific products or services.

If you are not using the sales literature feature for this common use case, let's consider how we might be able to use the sales literature feature to meet the requirements in a different use case by adding some simple customizations.

In this use case scenario, the requirement is to store documents related to a specific opportunity record and also allow the user to easily email those documents to their contacts from within the opportunity record. You might think it would be easy enough to store the documents in notes related to the opportunity record, but we cannot email documents attached to notes. You could develop a plug in or custom application to provide the required functionality, but let's see how some simple customizations can extend the sales literature feature to meet our requirements without developing code.

1. The first thing we need to do is to add an opportunity lookup field to the sales literature entity. If our sales literature records will always be related to an opportunity record then we should make this a required field to achieve an optimal user interface.

   

2. Add the new opportunity lookup field to the sales literature form. Optionally, change the Subject field from the out of box setting of 'Required' to 'Optional', and then hide it on the sales literature form.

   

3. Now we can simply add the sales literature subgrid to the opportunity form.

   

    

4. Navigate to the opportunity record and create the sales literature records that will hold the attachments related to this opportunity. You can store all files in one sales literature record, or you can create multiple sales literature records to store different groupings of files.

   When you are ready to email the files related to the opportunity record, simply click on the desired sales literature record in the subgrid.

   

5. Once the sales literature record is opened, click on 'SEND AS EMAIL'. This will open an email activity which will include the files as attachments.

   

6. Optionally, you can access the opportunities files from Sales Literature in the Marketing area of the ribbon.

   

If there is a desire to secure the files attached to an opportunity record, based on the opportunity owner assignment, you may hide the sales literature navigation link on the command bar so that the sales literature documents can only be accessed from within the opportunity record. This would enforce CRM security based on the owner of the opportunity. However, be aware that sales literature can also be attached from the CRM Outlook Client and hiding this command in Outlook would require a more extensive customization.

As always, if you need assistance the CRM experts at PowerObjects are here to help!!

Happy CRM'ing!