CRM Online to SharePoint Online Integration using REST and ADFS

Accessing SharePoint Online 2013 REST services with SSO via ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) from CRM Online provides loads of potential opportunities, especially now that SharePoint offers a huge REST API. You can call REST from a CRM Online Plugin or Custom Workflow activity with no dependencies on SharePoint Client dll’s or Azure getting in the way, It is fairly awesome I must say.

I use the HttpWebRequest class to perform SOAP requests to perform the authentication part of this integration, which is totally supported within Sandboxed Plugins and Custom Workflow Activities. You can read more about the restrictions of the CRM Sandboxed environment here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg334752.aspx. Once you get authenticated and obtain the cookies you are free to fire REST calls off by simply providing the cookies along with the request.

The best diagram I found to describe the authentication process visually was from Wictor Wilen’s blog http://www.wictorwilen.se/

I wanted to explore the issue of authentication between CRM Online and SharePoint Online from a server to server perspective and as you can imagine authentication is a big hurdle for this direct type of communication as every example I have seen so far includes Azure. Well at least until I started to look at what others were doing with Windows 8 Apps and Active Authentication. Omar Venado http://blogs.msdn.com/b/omarv/ and fellow MVP Wictor Wilen http://www.wictorwilen.se/ had some really great articles to help me build out a solution focused on this scenario. The code attached to this blog is heavily derived from Omar’s Windows 8 App code though now is useable in non Windows 8 App projects such as C# Console, SSIS Packages and of course CRM Plugin/Workflow projects. I have added some background reading at the bottom of this post so you can see the articles I used to get my code to work.

An example of how simple this code is to use

Uri spSite = new Uri(“https://myOrg.sharepoint.com/sites/mySite”);

bool success = SpoAuthUtility.Create(spSite, username@domain.com, WebUtility.HtmlEncode(“Pword123”), false);

string odataQuery = “_api/web/lists”;

Uri url = new Uri(String.Format(“{0}/{1}”, SpoAuthUtility.Current.SiteUrl, odataQuery));

// Send a json odata request to SPO rest services to fetch all list items for the list.

byte[] result = HTTPHelper.SendODataJsonRequest(

url,

“GET”, // reading data from SP through the rest api usually uses the GET verb

null,

(HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(url),

SpoAuthUtility.Current // pass in the helper object that allows us to make authenticated calls to SPO rest services

);

string response = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(result, 0, result.Length);

You can authenticate using corporate credentials if inside your network, username/password if outside your network (e.g CRM Online O365) and you can also use your onmicrosoft.com accounts. Remember that my primary focus was on server to server integration possibilities, not user to server contexts such as in the current SharePoint CRM List Component model.

The attached C# Console app contains 3 files to provide you with an example of how to use the 2 cs classes HTTPHelper and SPOAuthUtility. To authenticate and start calling REST from CRM Plugins/Workflows simple include the HTTPHelper and SPOAuthUtility cs files into your Plugin/Workflow project.

Example App is available here https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=492A170E77E43399!830

Background reading

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/omarv/archive/2012/10/25/windows-8-store-apps-office-365-enterprise-preview-sharepoint-online.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/omarv/archive/2012/11/15/developing-windows-store-apps-for-sharepoint-online-with-sso-single-sign-on.aspx

http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/How-to-do-active-authentication-to-Office-365-and-SharePoint-Online.aspx

http://allthatjs.com/2012/03/28/remote-authentication-in-sharepoint-online/