Thanks to dedication and smart business decisions, the Canadian Ivanhoé Cambridge has become one of the all-time greats in international real estate investments.

Founded in Quebec in 1953, Ivanhoé Cambridge holds interests in almost 500 properties through its subsidiaries and partnerships, focusing mainly on office, retail, residential and logistics real estate. With this number of properties to manage, the amount of documentation was considerable. And documentation is crucial in the real-estate business, as it helps evaluate the risks and supports timely and accurate decision making, while ensuring legislative compliance.

At first, the solution seemed to be rather straightforward, as Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers a standard out-of-the-box integration of SharePoint which enables organizations to link SharePoint documents with CRM records. Also, it enables users to manage SharePoint documents and utilize many of the document management features of SharePoint directly in the Dynamics CRM user interface. However, as the security models of Dynamics CRM and SharePoint differ significantly, this out-of-the box integration does not guarantee the same level of access to records in CRM and SharePoint.

Ultimately, the document management capabilities of SharePoint are integrated into CRM, but the security permissions of CRM are not enforced in SharePoint, which presents a potentially high-risk security issue when dealing with confidential an proprietary information.

CB Dynamics CRM – SharePoint Permissions Replicator covers the whole Dynamics CRM security model. It ensures the enforcement of proper user rights to SharePoint folders (such as libraries, sites and document sets). Thus it ensures that each document in SharePoint will be accessible only to those users who have access to the respective records in Dynamics CRM. Any modifications to the Dynamics CRM privileges for any record will be automatically applied to the permissions in SharePoint. Whenever a new document is uploaded and stored in SharePoint, it is immediately protected in accordance with the inherited permissions.

“The SharePoint documents appeared on the newly created teams’ SharePoint sites in a matter of minutes. They could begin to work right away. There was no time lost, waiting for the documents to be securely delivered.”

With CB Dynamics CRM – SharePoint Permissions Replicator, Ivanhoé Cambridge built a solution that seamlessly and automatically meets business and legislative requirements of data privacy and confidentiality. And due to the ultimate stability of the solution, they also managed to mitigate the need for outgoing maintenance.

“We didn’t have to look at each individual user and apply the security individually. It did it for us. That was unusual.”
With their documents safely stored, they can focus on what they do best – investing in real estate.