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Words of Wisdom as a Service (WoWaaS) from Alistair Speirs, Technology Specialist for Online Services @ Microsoft Australia.

New OBA (Sales Forecast)

New OBA (Sales Forecast)

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The OBA guys are doing some really , really cool stuff. As someone that works with salespeople every day, I know how tough and time consuming (but business critical) forecasting can be. Any time that an organisation can save from time consuming processes has a very clear benefit, and sales is possibly the place where time=money is most noticeable.

Remember, Coffee is for closers and manual processes are for losers.

About the E2E Sales Forecast OBA

The E2E Sales Forecast OBA walks you through a salesperson creating and submitting a quarterly sales forecast. Using a customized Excel template (built using VS 2008/VSTO), our salesperson has the ability to navigate to the team Sales Forecast portal (SharePoint portal), invoke a custom Excel sales forecast template from the New button (content type mapping to a custom template), load line-of-business sales data into the document (via WPF custom actions pane), generate executive reports for the forecast (via Open XML), and submit the document for approval (through SharePoint workflow).

The approving manager can interact directly with SharePoint or choose to approve the workflow via a custom Outlook Form Region (built using VS 2008/VSTO). Messaging of the workflow is marshalled by SharePoint, and Open XML enables the solution to parse out the necessary data and attach to workflow and to the custom Outlook from region. Also, we’ve added UC so the actors within the demo can interact with one another.

Featured technologies include:

  • SharePoint
  • Office Client Ribbon and Action Pane Customizations (VS 2008/VSTO)
  • Outlook Custom Form Regions
  • Open XML
  • Unified Communications (UC)
  • SharePoint Workflow
  • Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

For the community source-code download and accompanying Wrox book, you can check out the following resources:

 

E2E Sales Forecast OBA Resources

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