Using Business Connectivity Services (BCS), and BCS Meta Man you can connect to Salesforce data which enables you to build dashboards displaying Salesforce data within Microsoft SharePoint.

Business Connectivity Services and Salesforce

Business Connectivity Services enables you to read, and write back to Salesforce using External Lists, Display data within SharePoint using the Business Data Connectivity Web Parts such as the BDC List web part and the BDC Related list web part. Assuming that you are using the SharePoint 2013 Server Enterprise license, you can also search Salesforce via Business Connectivity Services. SharePoint lists and libraries can also be configured to lookup meta data from Salesforce if you are using the External Data Column. Again, using SharePoint Server Enterprise, you will be able to take advantage of the Office Integration and use the Salesforce data within Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, and Visio.

 

Using BCS Meta Man to connect to Salesforce

Microsoft SharePoint Designer allows you to connect to Microsoft SQL, .NET Assemblies, or WCF services and unfortunately will not allow you to connect directly to Salesforce without you writing the code manually.

Using the Lightning Tools BCS Meta Man, you can connect to Salesforce without writing any code. It will require configuring a few things in Salesforce, setting up Secure Store within Microsoft SharePoint, and then building your connection with Meta Man. Full instructions can be found within the BCS Meta Man documentation.

The consumer key and consumer secret are obtained from within your Salesforce.com environment under the Connected Apps settings.

 

 

 

 

Building Associations

Using BCS Meta Man, you can drag the Salesforce tables onto the design surface. From the design surface, you can preview the data, add custom actions, build methods, filters, set title column, and office type properties as well as dragging and dropping associations between the two entities.

 

 

 

 

 

Other Products

Lightning Tools also provides additional products such as the Data Viewer Web Part and the SharePoint Chart web part that can be used to build powerful dashboards within Microsoft SharePoint whilst utilizing the BCS Salesforce External Content Type

All three of these products are available as a bundle.