Entries tagged with office live - Channel 9

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!

Bill Gates: Backstage at the Office Developer Conference

Dan Fernandez — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:03:29 GMT

May 21 - Redmond

June 5 - Boston

June 11- Silicon Valley

In this special edition of The MicroISV Show, Scott Burmester, Don Campbell and Rohit Puri talk about the upcoming Office Live Review for MicroISVs. Are you coming?

How to Register:

1. Click on the registration link: https://microsoft.crgevents.com/officelive/

2. Select New Registration
3. Supply the Registration Code: GENATT

Do you build software solutions and/or provide services to small business?

Do you want to create an additional stream of income with a low technical barrier of entry?

Are you interested in knowing how to take advantage of the shifting software plus services paradigm?

Then the Office Live Review for Micro ISVs is the event you should attend!

Come hear details about the Office Live platform, how you can easily integrate with your applications, create solutions and offer services to small businesses, and… receive a free copy of Office 2007 Ultimate and Windows Vista Ultimate! The first 20 people to create an Office Live solution and post it to the Office Live Marketplace will also receive a Zune!

Office Live provides you with an opportunity to access the 6 million US based small business market in a saleable and profitable manner through extending the Office Live platform by:

· Extend and integrate your existing products via the Office Live web services and the Windows Live SDK to interact with the Office Live environment accessing contact information, presence management, document management, shared calendaring and more.

· Creating customized, verticalized, and niche solutions offered to a single customer or created for a broad audience

· Providing design and other consulting services to Office Live customers

· Extending the capability of a customer’s existing server deployment with extranet based solutions that may integrate with other applications

Office Live is a set of web-based services for small businesses to manage their business online. It consists of a public facing web site for their customers and private web site that employees can use to collaborate and manage the business. The private site comes with business applications for managing contacts, e-mail, calendars, projects, documents, sales and more.

To the developer Office Live represents a compelling software-as-a-service platform for rapidly building custom solutions available to thousands of small businesses.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

When:

May 21^st ^th, 2007 9AM-5PM

Where:

Redmond, Washington in the Platform Adoption Center @ Building 20.

What:

This one-day workshop will focus on delivering the following goals for the attendees:

Understand Microsoft’s Office Live strategy and how to build solutions that extend it.
Understand Microsoft Office Live offerings – Office Live Basic, Office Live Collaboration, and Office Live Essentials, and what types of scenarios each of these apply to.
Learn about Office Live Business Applications and Shared Workspaces.
Learn how to customize the Office Live environment, including templates, look and feel, web parts, and navigation. Understand when to use Site Designer and when to use SharePoint Designer to customize the environment.
Learn how to extend the Office Live environment, to create verticalized applications. This includes defining workflow rules, data sharing, web parts and mash-ups.

The workshop will provide developers with the necessary experience to exploit Office Live functionality in the following technologies:

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) v3 (Web Parts, Workflows, Lists, Content types, Web services)
Office 2007 (SharePoint Designer, InfoPath 2007, Access 2007, Excel 2007)
Office Live Specific (Business Applications, Shared Sites, Site Designer, SBA Sharing Workspace)
Windows Live ID
Web Technologies (HTML, XHTML, Web Design, CSS)

Attendees are encouraged to consider the following pre-requisites to ensure a positive experience in the workshop:

Active development experience with C# and/or VB.NET or JavaScript
Active development experience with Windows SharePoint Services v3 and Office SharePoint Server.
Basic understanding of Web technologies such as HTML, CSS, RSS, client-side scripting
Ideally development experience with Office client applications
Basic understanding of SharePoint portal technology

Workshop Format:

The course will be comprised of module covering an Office Live concept. The agenda for the one-day event is as follows:

Start	Stop	Description
08:30	09:00	Arrival and registration
09:00	09:15	Welcome and logistics
09:15	10:00	Understanding the Office Live Architecture
10:00	11:00	Understanding the Office Live Data and Storage Architecture
11:00	12:00	Using Workflows to Define Business Rules in Office Live Apps
12:00	13:00	Lunch
13:00	14:00	Programming with the Office Live Web Service API
14:00	15:00	Integrating with Office Live Authentication using Windows Live ID
15:00	15:15	Break
15:15	16:15	Build Office Live Integration using VS with Project GlidePath
16:15	17:15	Creating Mash-Ups in Office Live
17:15		Dinner

Office Live Overview for Developers

doncho — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 00:05:44 GMT

This is a screen cast recording of Office Live as a platform for developers to build on and customize.

The topics covered include:

What is Office Live?
Opportunity for partners to build on the platform

Customizing the Private Site
Office Live Business Applications and Workspaces
Developing Custom Applications (Business rules, Data, etc.)
Data Connectivity
Workflow
Customizing with SharePoint Designer

Customizing the Public Site
Customizing with Site Designer and Page Editor
Data sharing across private and public site

Integrating with Office applications
Integrating with Smart Client applications
Client side mashups (Virtual Earth, Office Live Web Service APIs)

Warning: this recording contains PowerPoint Slides as well as a short demonstration of a customized Office Live site. The slides were necessary to introduce some core concepts and diagrams. If PPT slides hurt your eyes then consider yourself warned :)

Duration: 31:57

Use data sharing to connect your public and private Office Live web sites

doncho — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 00:59:58 GMT

Chris Beiter, Developer Platform PM for Office Live, shows how to use Data Sharing to connect your public Office Live web site to your secure private Office Live site.

Data Sharing allows you to automate collection or publishing of data from and to your web site. Once the data is in a list, you can use workflow, views, and Office client integration.

In the screencast, you'll see how to use the data capture web part to capture "leads" from the public web site and update a new Web Leads area in the Business Contact Manager (BCM). This triggers a workflow to e-mail to a business manager to qualify it. This person can then initiate another workflow to move the lead to the BCM contacts list.

Related Links:

Duration: 26:59

Office Live Workflows

doncho — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 01:24:57 GMT

In this Office Live screencast, Albert Shen shows you how to add Workflows to Office Live Business Applications using SharePoint Designer 2007.

Office Live is built on Windows SharePoint Services v3 and as a result, leverages the powerful new Office Live Developer Guide

MSDN Office Live Developer Portal

MSDN Forums for Office Live

Office Live web site

Video length: 14:12

Using the Data Form Web Part in Office Live

doncho — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 00:40:42 GMT

In this Office Live screencast, Albert Shen shows you how to use SharePoint Designer 2007 to build powerful views of your business data, and integrate them into your Office Live Business Applications.

The Data form web part can consume data from various data sources including SharePoint lists, SharePoint libraries, server side scripts, RSS feeds, XML files, databases, web services, or an aggregation of these sources.

Using ASP.NET 2.0 data source controls, the data form web part retrieves data as an XML document, and then uses XSLT to transform the data for the browser.

Related Links:

Video length: 17:16

Office Live with SharePoint Designer

doncho — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 23:33:47 GMT

SharePoint Designer 2007 is a great tool for designing, developing and customizing your Business Applications in Office Live.

In this screencast Albert Shen, a software design engineer on the Office Live team, will show you the various capabilities in SharePoint Designer and how you can use them with Office Live.

He covers:

Site Management Tools
   Files, lists, workflows, Master pages
   Moving folders
   Adding and removing files from the site

Creating new file content
   HTML, ASPX, CSS, Master Pages, DWT, JavaScript, Text
   SharePoint Content like lists, libraries, surveys and workflows
   Create new pages from scratch using included CSS layouts

Page Editing
   Design, split, and code views
   Quick tag editor
   CSS property grid
   Navigating through CSS containers
   ASP.NET Master Pages support
   Accessiblity and standards compliance checker

Related Links:

Video Length: 13:36

What's Office Live?

Charles — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 17:00:22 GMT

What is Office Live, anyway? How does it relate to Windows Live? How does it relate to Office 2007? We interviewed the Office Live team to get the answers. Brian Jeans, Tara Brown and David Lee give us the details, show off some of the cool features, and explain what it means for developers. Check it out!

Here are the links mentioned in the video:

Office Live Team Blog: http://spaces.msn.com/OfficeLiveBlog/

Office Live Community Forums: http://officelivecommunity.com/

Office Live Dev Center on MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/service/officelive/

http://officelive.microsoft.com