Chris's unofficial Office Live developer blog : SharePoint Designer

Office Live Business Contact Manager + Zillow.com mashup sample

cbeiter — Wed, 16 May 2007 23:00:00 GMT

A pretty cool mashup courtesy of our devs Katy and Albert (who you may be familiar with from his screencast videos). There is a complete writeup coming soon on the Office Live team blog, but since the sample is already posted, I wanted to get the word out to my blog subscribers also. UPDATE: Here's a link to the formal write up on the team blog.

Short version, the tool passes the addresses of contacts from your Office Live Business Contact Manager to Zillow.com's API Network and displays property estimates (aka Zestimates), charts, maps, comparables, etc. for the contact you select.

It's a very simple scenario, but the underlying concept of having a Contact Management store in the cloud accessible from any computer with an internet connection and that can integrate easily with other services for value added scenarios, that's pretty cool. OK, I am a geek.

Thanks David and Mark at Zillow for your help.

SharePoint Designer Training videos

cbeiter — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:19:00 GMT

Office Live recommends SharePoint Designer as the premier development tool for building composite applications and enhancements to the Office Live Business Applications. I think I've mentioned that here before. Well, our friends on the SPD team have created several useful training videos that you should check out. There are 6 of them. I think 5 of them are fully relevant to Office Live. The 6th one regarding the Visual Studio add-ins is not relevant to Office Live because you cannot upload your own custom code.

Enjoy!

Screencast video of Data Sharing in Office Live

cbeiter — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 04:15:00 GMT

In the latest version of Office Live we introduced a new feature called Data Sharing. Essentially this acts as a pipeline between your public web site and web pages and your private site Business Applications on Office Live. You can use Data Sharing to either pipe data into a Bizapp list from a form on your public site or, in reverse, you can use it to pipe data from a Bizapp list back out to your web site.

I created a little screencast demo on how to create a form to collect leads from your website and integrate it into your Business Contact Manager bizapp. It's pretty cool, if a little geeky, a feature only a developer could love.

Anyway, here's the link to the video. Check it out.

Workflow in Office Live

cbeiter — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 04:10:00 GMT

We've been heads-down crunching on the next release for Office Live, so I've been pretty bad at blogging for the last few weeks. But the WSS team blogged a couple weeks ago about a new whitepaper regarding Windows Workflow Foundations and it's use in Windows SharePoint Services version 3.

Since Office Live is moving to WSS v3 in our next release, we'll also be making Workflow available. Office SharePoint Designer is the tool of choice for configuring workflow on Office Live. So, once again, if you are thinking of being an Office Live Solution Developer, you should be ramping up on SharePoint Designer and WSS v3. Now make sure to add to the mix the Windows Workflow Foundation functionality in SPD.

Workflow Designer is really rich, and there's a ton you can do with it. You can create tasks, modify list items, send emails, create forms & surveys, and so on and so on. Since the target market for Office Live if small businesses, who rarely have the time or inclination to experiment with technology, Solution Developers should have the experience and know-how to recommend if Workflow is right for the customer's scenarios on Office Live.

Note that we're not going to open up our Office Live servers to custom Actions, because that requires uploading custom code to our server environment. This is consistent with our current plans on custom WSS web parts, which we also won't be supporting... yet. They are both things we want to achieve in future versions.

Anyway, enough for now. Just coming up for a quick breath of air, before I dive back in.