Entries tagged with office business applications - Channel 9

Transcensus Interview and Demonstration - Deliver easy training with SHO Guide

John O'Donnell — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 13:56:00 GMT

Just before Convergence 2009 wrapped up I caught up with Dan Higbee and Dan Peay from www.transcensus.com and talked with them about their solution for delivering application help. In this video we show it running with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online but it can also be used with Microsoft Office applications, Dynamics or any application developed using Microsoft .NET.

Product Demonstration starts at time index - 5:45

Enjoy the show!

John O'Donnell Microsoft Dynamics ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell
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ARCast.TV - Luke Chung on Access Db and Migration Challenges

Bob Familiar — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:46:00 GMT

In this interview, Luke Chung, founder and president of FMS, shares his view on Microsoft Access database solutions -- where they fit well, what challenges users and developers often face in creating and maintaining them, and how they have evolved from standalone desktop solutions to having the capability to be integrated with web-based and SharePoint centric solutions. He further explains primary reasons why some Access database solutions are migrated to SQL Server database based solutions, what different approaches are used to carry out migrations, and how to get started with the migration process when a large number of Access databases are involved.

You can get more info here.

New Features for Visual Studio 2008 Office Projects in SP1

Beth Massi — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:49:00 GMT

In this interview, Kris Makey, a Developer on the Office Client team, shows us a couple new features of Office projects in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. First he demonstrates a new error logging feature that will log any end-user install errors to the Event Log making it much easier to tell what went wrong. He also shows us how you can place Winforms controls directly on document surfaces.

For more information on Office Development with Visual Studio visit the developer portal http://msdn.com/vsto and the team blog http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto/.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

The Dynamics Duo talk about CRM and Office Business Applications (OBA)

Ben Riga — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:11:00 GMT

In the last episode we talked about Microsoft Office SharePoint Server; in this one we talk about Microsoft Office on the client side.

CRM actually integrates really really well with Microsoft Office Outlook right out of the box. That’s a natural as it’s the place where many people work day-in day-out (and especially those sales and marketing folks). But what about those people that need that data in Word or Excel? In this episode we talk about how easy it is to customize the integration of Dynamics CRM with Microsoft Office on the client side. This category of applications, often referred to as Office Business Applications (OBA), help to unlock the value of line-of-business (LOB) systems, such as the ones built on the Dynamics CRM platform, and turn document-based processes into real applications. There’s lots more info about these types of apps over at OBA Central.

In the demo Girish put together, we see how the app is surfaced with a custom ribbon. This in turn opens a Status Report template which has a custom task pane. That task pane pulls all the relevant information for my status report from the CRM server (in our case CRM Online). It authenticates and then grabs the project info. When I choose a Project it also pulls in the work items for that project. Just like with the SharePoint example, it’s trivial to open a CRM form right from within Word where I review more detailed info or even start an Office Communicator session with the owner of the work item.

I can then insert the work items along with descriptions and hours worked directly into the status report. Since you’ll want to share that status report with your customer, Girish built in the ability to publish it to Office Live Small Business. Office Live is the ideal place for sharing documents with customers or partners who won’t have access to SharePoint sites behind your firewall (and it’s free!).

The secret sauce that allows these kinds of apps to be developed so quickly is right in Visual Studio in the form of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). As you might expect, the same authentication code we used in the SharePoint example is used for authentication from with the OBA. Then it’s just a case of using the Dynamics CRM web services to pull info from CRM and post it into the Word doc. Nice!