Satya's Blog : Mashups

Office Business Application services & Dynamics

satyanadella — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 10:17:00 GMT

At Tech Ed, Microsoft will announce Office Business Application (OBA) services. This announcement nicely builds on the previous two posts. Think of OBA as the platform support for “business mash-ups” in Office. To date we have been using Sharepoint 2.0...(read more)

MBS @ Tech Ed - Extensibility, Customization and Business Mash-Ups

satyanadella — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 00:08:00 GMT

At TechEd Darren Laybourn & James Utzschneider will be presenting a keynote at the MBS track. As usual lots of demos are planned. There is a new RSS feed demo for Dynamics AX 4.0 using its web services framework (AIF). They will go through how to...(read more)

Dynamics - "Light -Up" on Vista & Composite Applications - Bill Gates at Convergence

satyanadella — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 09:09:00 GMT

Watch for the Dynamics client demo tomorrow at Convergence. It’s an immersive roles based user experience that shows how we adapt Windows Vista & Office 2007 UX concepts to Dynamics. You will see how “stacks” from Vista can help give you visual cues on how to prioritize work. “Ribbons”, from Office 2007, help with command presentation. And the “breadcrumb bar” from Vista will help you traverse back the application path that you take. The coolest part will be Dynamics “light-up” on Vista. We will show the power of Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) controls on Vista as part of Dynamics user experience. Also we will "mashup" Windows Live local as as part of the user experience. The key takeaway is that these user experiences can be customized for specific verticals and roles by our partners & customers.

Also we will show our first composite app where we automate the process of on-boarding a new vendor into your ERP system. The app was built using Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) on SharePoint and integrates with Dynamics AX logic/data using its web service interfaces. What I really like about the scenario is the fact that an end user can add ad-hoc workflows on top of what a VAR/IT provides you, using the native capabilities of SharePoint in Office 2007. This proves the point that, for all the process standards out there, there will always be un-planned and personalized extensions.

One announcement to watch for is our connectors for Dynamics CRM. We have several internal projects within Microsoft, where teams are using Dynamics CRM to surround Siebel to benefit from our middle tier that is easier to extend and a user experience that is native in Outlook and a natural part of their work!! We are going to release sample code between now and WPC (July 06 in Boston) that builds on the great work that BizTalk team has done around connectors to enable the integration of core entities between Dynamics CRM and legacy CRM systems from SAP and Siebel.

RSS for Dynamics CRM - Is Now Available

satyanadella — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 23:58:00 GMT

RSS feed generator for CRM is now available for. The idea here was to support taking any Advanced Find saved query in CRM and make it available as an RSS feed.

Read about RSS support for CRM & Download

Thanks Michaeljon Miller and CRM UE/PM team….. you are awesome.

Be sure to read Michaeljon's Blog for more details.

Dynamics Web Services - Business Mash-Ups; Composite Apps; Integrations

satyanadella — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 06:28:00 GMT

Web Services in Dynamics Wave 1 releases. What is the intent behind them?

The core vision behind what we are doing is Roles Based Productivity. To deliver on this vision, you have to start with “People” and really connect them up to their “work” (i.e. process). In the real world most people’s work is split across multiple applications and the “seams” show. Web Services is the foundational infrastructure that helps us get rid of the “seams”.

Web Services support in Dynamics is helping us with the following scenarios:

1. Business “Mash-Ups”. What we recently released with Dynamics Snap is a good example of this. We use the Web Services exposed by Dynamics to enable users of Outlook to do Time Entry or Vacation Scheduling directly without having to leave Outlook. We also enable you write a letter to a customer using Word wherein you want to look up Business data from Dynamics regarding that customer’s cases, or invoices, or any other business entity. You can think of this class of applications as “mash-ups” of Office and Dynamics. You can also extend this to doing “mash-ups” of Dynamics with the Web. A good example of this is a sandbox sample code on how to “mash-up” CRM with MapPoint (Mapping in CRM). Also another very useful tool that we will be releasing soon (on CRM Sandbox) enables you to create an RSS feed for any CRM entity. This for example will allow you to get an RSS feed with the latest opportunities or cases on any PC or device with a browser/RSS reader.

2. Composite Apps. Many business processes today span the boundaries of structured/un-structured & formal process/ad-hoc workflow. Take for example – Recruiting. Your finance person creates a requisition in Dynamics. Then you have your recruiting person login to Sharepoint portal to initiate an interview process and finally additional folks in HR and IT get involved in on-boarding the employee. This is a business process that is composite of formal data and process (creation and approval of requisitions) in Dynamics and more semi-structured/ad-hoc workflow (interview process) and both need to be linked together into one seamless collaborative business process. Again with Dynamics exposing Web Services and exposing them enables you build these Composite Collaborative Apps. We will focus on building such apps on top of Sharepoint and you will see us do several demos of these type of apps at Convergence.

3. Integrations. The more “classical” use of Web Services has been to reduce the expense of integrations. Within Microsoft our IT is using Web Services to support the integration of Dynamics with some of the other legacy Enterprise apps such as Siebel and SAP . A good example of this the XBOX team using Dynamics to manage their production planning, while still integrating with financials in SAP. We are see this as an increasing trend in our Enterprise accounts where Dynamics is being used to “surround” legacy enterprise applications to take advantage of the more user friendly user experience and a more agile customization model. At Convergence we will talk more about some additional connectors to these legacy Enterprise Apps that we will make available for Dynamics, building on work that the BizTalk team has done.

The Web Services work is the foundation that enables the above three application scenarios in support of our overall vision of Roles Based Productivity. We will talk a lot more about this at Convergence. Our goal with our Web Services work is to ground this in Community feedback, just as we have done with our User Experience. We want really anchor the Web Services we work on and their behavior on real world application needs. I am trying to convince our program management team to have Web Services lounge areas similar to how our UX team reaches out to the Convergence audience… I have some additional convincing to do!!

(PS: I am told that Jeff Hensel and others are doing focus group on Web Services. So I don't need to worry about convincing anybody that reaching out to the community as we define further advances in Web Services is the way to go...)

Dynamics Snap!!

satyanadella — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 00:29:00 GMT

Dynamics Snap. We launched a new collection of software programs that snap into Microsoft Office, enabling users to access Microsoft Dynamics in a familiar and easy way.

We built the following Office 2003 Snap-Ins for Dynamics AX – i) Timesheet Snap-In; ii) Vacation Management Snap-In; iii) Business Data Lookup Snap-In. In addition we also enabled – iv) Business Data Loookup Snap-In for Dynamics CRM. These four new programs enable users to easily enter/retrieve data in Microsoft Dynamics using the familiar interface of Microsoft Office 2003.

We also are making all these programs available as “code” using the shared source model in our code gallery in GotDotNet.com. We want to see innovation across the ecosystem along the lines of what we just released today. You will find the code in: Dynamics Snap-In Sandbox .

Along the same lines, we released sample code for Dynamics CRM SharePoint Web part on MSDN. This enables you to build portals and SharePoint sites by using Web Parts that display CRM data. You can find the sample at : Dynamics CRM Web Part

Lastly I got a chance to see a very cool Business Mash-up built for Dynamics CRM by one of our partners. Quilogy and Factiva partnered to bring information from Factiva database to CRM user experience in the context of the sales tasks. So now users of CRM can get update on account records, qualify leads, identify trigger events etc directly from within CRM because this add-in does the mash-up of Factiva data with CRM data all in the context of user and their task. You can find more information on this at: Factiva/Quilogy - Business Mash-up for Dynamics CRM