Girish Raja's Dynamic(s) Thoughts : Office

Business Action Virtual Tour On Demand

girishr — Wed, 06 May 2009 23:32:32 GMT

Last week I had the opportunity to present four webcasts as part of the Business Action Virtual Tour (BAVT) wherein we discussed about building line of business applications using the CRM (XRM) platform and how you can extend it to create compelling experiences (using WPF & Silverlight), reuse familiar skills (using Office Platform) and how to provide the power of choice to your customers (using Azure platform).

If you missed any of these events, don’t worry; we recorded all of them and have it available for you free of cost. Ben Riga was handling the Q&A during the session and has also posted a nice summary of the Q&A as part of his blog post. I’d encourage you to view the high fidelity version of the Live Meeting replay.

1- XRM, the Line of Business Application Framework

2- Compelling experiences (WPF & Silverlight)

3- Familiar Skills (Office, SharePoint & UC)

4- The power of choice (Azure Services Platform)

So set aside just four hours of your time, get the projector, crank up the volume and gather all your colleagues around . It’s show time!

What does free SPD mean to you?

girishr — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 05:47:40 GMT

The recent announcement that SharePoint Designer (SPD) will be offered for free makes me very excited. Being a SharePoint consultant not long ago, I can truly appreciate how the free SPD & WSS will revolutionize the content management space. When the announcement came out that this change was effective from April 1st, I had every reason to suspect the legitimacy of it but looks like it was all real!

SPD allows you to build a variety of things starting from designing simple websites (remember FrontPage!) to wonderful dashboards that revolutionize enterprise solutions.

While working on the “Dynamicss Duo” CRM 4.0 demo, we made heavy use of SPD and the results truly speak to the power this tool has.

In the above screenshot, one can see a heavily customized SharePoint page Iframed into CRM. Using SPD we built this Intranet style dashboard pages with connected webparts and also using a set of pre-built 3rd party webparts.

If you had seen the CRM demo that was shown at the Day1 Keynote of PDC2008, you can see the below attractive customer portal that doesn’t look anything like SharePoint but it actually runs on SharePoint Online and was built using SPD.

SPD allows customizing such SaaS SharePoint extranet sites even when you don’t have physical access to the server. In the above screenshot, the gauge display is actually a Silverlight control running in SharePoint, and the webpart to the right is called a dataview webpart that connects to CRM web services. Dataview webparts are a very powerful feature of SharePoint as you can easily build data bound webparts and SPD allows you to build it without writing any code.

This is just a tip of the iceberg and developers are free to deliver a variety of custom portal solutions, extranets, intranets, internet-facing sites, collaboration solutions, social networking sites, and internal applications on top of the extensive capabilities of SharePoint. Integrating these with Dynamics CRM makes it even more compelling and presents a good business opportunity for providing value-added solutions to your customers.

Action Packed Business Applications Coming to US

girishr — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 04:06:35 GMT

In a series of world-wide events called Business Action World Tour, we’re showcasing how Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can build serious line of business applications without a lot of effort. To add to that, if you could create a rich & compelling UI (with WPF & Silverlight), make it familiar to your users (with Office system), and give a choice of on-site or cloud deployment to the customer (with Azure Services), wouldn’t that be a wonderful opportunity for more business.

If you think so, all you need to do is spend half a day at one of our free “discover” events. The next upcoming one in the US is on May 4th at Chicago and we have another one coming up in Silicon Valley on May 6th.

For more information about the event and links to register, check out John O'Donnell blog article below.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell/archive/2009/04/01/discover-a-new-way-to-build-line-of-business-applications-at-chicago-may-4th-and-mountain-view-ca-may-6th.aspx

Creating an OBA - Word Add-in for CRM

girishr — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:25:07 GMT

It's Office time folks. If you you've watched the channel9 video on CRM-OBA, here is some sample code and screencast that'll get you going.

Download the code

Creating an OBA - Word Add-in for CRM

Download the video

WPF code and screencast are coming right out. Keep coding folks!

Sarcasm

girishr — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:58:57 GMT

I love Onenote and evangelize it’s use equally as I evangelize CRM.

This sarcasm from Office Offline blog by David Salaguinto is the best blog humor I’ve seen in a while.

His blog is one of the reasons why I don’t effectively use my time at work :)

BTW, shouldn’t he call it Office Dead (Live) instead of Office Offline. Hey, I’m just following the rules of our marketing here.