Best SharePoint Integrations: Teams, Power BI, Salesforce, ServiceNow & Dynamics 365

The fundamental relationship

SharePoint and Teams are not separate systems that integrate — they are architecturally unified. Every Microsoft Teams team automatically creates a SharePoint team site. The Files tab in every Teams channel maps directly to a document library folder in that SharePoint site. When users upload files to Teams, they are storing them in SharePoint. When IT admins manage SharePoint permissions on the underlying site, those permissions affect what Teams members can access in Files.

What the integration delivers

• SharePoint tab in Teams: Add any SharePoint page, list, or document library as a tab in a Teams channel — users interact with SharePoint content without leaving Teams
• SharePoint news in Teams: SharePoint news posts from the intranet appear as notifications in Teams via Viva Connections or the SharePoint app
• File co-authoring: Files opened from the Teams Files tab open in Office for the Web with real-time co-authoring; comments and @mentions in the document notify team members in Teams chat
• Power Automate bridging: Teams-triggered flows can read/write SharePoint data; SharePoint-triggered flows can post to Teams channels — this is the most powerful integration pattern

Common configuration mistakes

• Granting guest access in Teams without realising it also grants SharePoint site access
• Deleting the underlying SharePoint site when archiving a Teams team — this permanently deletes all the team's files
• Not restricting SharePoint sharing settings at the site level, allowing Teams members to create Anyone links for files the team owns

Two directions of integration

The SharePoint-Power BI integration works in both directions: Power BI can use SharePoint lists as a data source to build reports, and Power BI reports can be embedded directly into SharePoint pages.

Power BI reports embedded in SharePoint

The Power BI web part lets you embed any published Power BI report or dashboard directly into a SharePoint page. The embedded report respects Power BI Row-Level Security (RLS) — each viewer sees only the data they have permission to see in Power BI, regardless of what SharePoint permissions they have. Implementation:

1. Publish the report to a Power BI workspace (not "My workspace")
2. On the SharePoint page, add the Power BI web part
3. Paste the report URL from Power BI's browser address bar into the web part
4. Users viewing the page must have a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User licence to see the embedded report

SharePoint lists as Power BI data sources

Power BI Desktop's SharePoint Online List connector lets you import or directquery SharePoint list data for reporting. Useful for tracking approval volumes, project status distributions, contract expiry timelines, and other structured data that lives in SharePoint lists. Limitations: the SharePoint List connector is not the most performant for large lists (over 5,000 items); for high-volume data, consider syncing SharePoint list data to Dataverse or Azure SQL and querying that instead.

Why organisations integrate these two systems

Salesforce is the system of record for customer relationships; SharePoint is the document and collaboration platform. The gap between them — sales teams emailing documents outside Salesforce, contracts stored locally, proposals not linked to CRM records — is where value is lost. Integration closes that gap.

Integration patterns

Use cases

ServiceNow is the dominant ITSM platform for enterprise IT service management. SharePoint integration adds document management, knowledge base access, and collaboration capabilities that ServiceNow lacks natively.

• IT knowledge base in SharePoint, surfaced in ServiceNow: IT articles authored in SharePoint are indexed by Microsoft Search and can be surfaced via the ServiceNow Virtual Agent using a Copilot Studio integration
• Incident-to-document workflow: When a P1 incident is created in ServiceNow, Power Automate automatically creates a SharePoint incident workspace (site or folder) for the response team's documentation — post-incident review, runbooks, root cause analysis
• Change request documentation: When a ServiceNow change request is approved, Power Automate creates a SharePoint document set for implementation documentation, test results, and sign-off records — all linked back to the change record via URL
• Asset data synchronisation: ServiceNow's CMDB data (hardware assets, software licences) can be pushed to a SharePoint list for department-level visibility using scheduled Power Automate flows with the ServiceNow connector

Native document management integration

Dynamics 365 has native SharePoint document management built in. When enabled, each Dynamics 365 record (Account, Opportunity, Case, etc.) gets a corresponding SharePoint folder. Documents attached to that record in Dynamics are actually stored in SharePoint — giving users the full SharePoint experience (version history, co-authoring, search, retention) while working within Dynamics 365.

Enabling the native integration

1. In Dynamics 365 Admin Centre, navigate to System > Document Management > SharePoint Integration
2. Enter the SharePoint site URL where documents will be stored
3. Enable document management for each Dynamics entity (Account, Lead, Case, etc.) you want to manage documents for
4. Dynamics creates folder structures in SharePoint matching the entity hierarchy

Beyond the native integration

The native integration covers document storage. For richer scenarios — automated document generation from Dynamics templates, approval workflows that span Dynamics and SharePoint, or reporting across both systems — Power Automate and Power BI are the connective tools. The Dynamics 365 connector in Power Automate provides access to all standard Dynamics entities for reads, creates, updates, and deletes without custom code.