You will need the following:
- Enterprise Search Centre Website in SharePoint
- External Data Type that is linked to Dynamics CRM (please refer to the previous article here)
- Search Service Application in SharePoint
- SharePoint Designer
- The configuration procedure shown in this article
Step 1
Configure the External Content Type to enable Profile Page creation as shown in the pictures below.
Step 2
Open the site in SharePoint Designer for the External Content Type that needs to be searchable. Click on the Create Profile Page.
Step 3
Once done, choose the field from the list that you want to set as the Title in the search result. Click on the "Set as Title" menu option.
After this is done, the Field Name is modified as shown below.
Step 4
Create a New Content Source in your Search Application. Choose Line of Business Data. Select the appropriate BDC Service Application and choose to crawl only the selected external data source.
In case you choose to crawl all the external data sources you will get an error as in the following.
Step 5
Start a full crawl on the newly created Content Source.
Click on the Crawl Log to check if the crawl has succeeded or failed.
Step 6
Now search the Contacts from the Enterprise Search Centre and voila! Here are the results from Dynamics CRM as well as from SharePoint.
Step 7
Click on any of the links. Notice the Title is the FullName field we selected as the Title when we created the profile page. If you now change this data from Dynamics CRM, it will be reflected immediately in SharePoint.