Is there a way i can find out if the current meeting window from which i opened the add-in (compose mode) is from a new meeting or from an already created meeting that i opened for edit?
Currently this feature, you requested, is not a part of the product. We track Outlook add-in feature requests on our user-voice page. Please add your request there. Feature requests on user-voice are considered when we go through our planning process.
There are a lot of use cases where this is relevant:
I believe the purpose of many add-ins is to augment the item (e.g. appointment/meeting or email), the user is currently reading or composing. This is usually done in a 3rd party system by associating the meeting in Exchange with a "record" in a separate system. To find out if the current meeting is already associated with a "record" (and possibly display the contents of it), you need a way to identify the meeting obviously. If it's a new meeting, you know there isn't a "record", however if it's an existing meeting, you need to be able to identity it. Exposing itemId in compose mode would satisfy this need. And by the way, the feature is already requested on User Voice!
I can only speculate as to why Microsoft haven't added the feature yet, but I think Office JS started out with support for emails. Compose-mode for emails is almost exclusively for authoring new (unsent) emails, hence they would never have an itemId.
This is not the case for appointments and meetings, however. They are frequently being edited after they have been created, as meetings are often rescheduled, augmented with a more detailed agenda, etc.
Unfortunately the workaround of using saveAsync to obtain the itemId has several drawbacks as you already alluded to: it's very intrusive as it will leave behind "ghost" meetings (as the user now can't regret saving an appointment/meeting) and it causes the sending of spurious meeting update requests to attendees, etc. And it doesn't work in Outlook for Mac! - one of the big selling points of this add-in technology compared to VSTO/COM-add-ins.
At my company we have attempted several times to port our existing VSTO add-in to Office JS, but everytime we stall on this exact issue, as the drawbacks are simply to many!
However, an approach - besides maybe using some crude heuristics - we have thought about, goes like this:
1) Via EWS (or MS Graph), augment every meeting(!) of every user(!) with a custom add-in property containing the itemId. See: https://stackoverflow.com/a/43140644/10752973 on how to set custom properties from the "outside".
2) When the add-in is opened, see if the custom property is present. If the custom property is there, it's an existing appointment/meeting (and you'll know its itemId). If it isn't there, it's a new appointment.
As I said, we haven't implemented it, but in theory it might work. But it's such a huge hassle (and will burden both the Exchange server and the application itself), for something so simple. We would effectively also need to monitor each mailbox in Exchange to detect newly creating appointment/meetings in order to augment them with the custom property, which is needlessly complex.
But I hope this answer might convince the Outlook Add-ins Team to reconsider adding support for obtaining itemId in compose-mode for appointments/meetings.
Related
Accordint to this blog one can hide the business process flows. I'm trying to follow it but there's no flows defined for my opportunity (according to the list).
I'd like to "delete" the flow for Opportunity entity (or at least affect it somehow to display different steps/different number of steps). The reason is that we'll be migrating from an older version and they've got a picklist with percentages of the deal being done. Not sure how to map it onto the Opportunity in 2013 and even if, I'm not sure the client'd like it.
Is it at all possible to remove business process flow from Opportunity in CRM 2013?
When I do follow the guide and fool around with all flows, I get to remove the one for Opportunity but then I'm shown the error message as in the image below. So I'm assuming that it's not the correct approach. Or did the blogger referred to in the first paragraph cheat and took his screenshot after closing the warning? :)
The blogger in the blog is using the earlier version of Dynamics CRM than yours. Newer versions of Dynamics CRM will show the above warning.
Beside one way in the blog, there are a couple of way to show/hide Business Process Flow:
use Javascript to set the display attribute of process bar element:
function hideBusinessProcessFlow()
{
document.getElementById('header_process_d').style.display = "none";
}
function showBusinessProcessFlow()
{
document.getElementById('header_process_d').style.display = "block";
}
Reference: https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/misscrm360exploration/archive/2014/07/24/show-and-hide-business-process-flow-in-crm-2011-2013.aspx
Please note that this is unsupported customization.
Update processid and stageid fields of the record. Use update these fields with Javascript or writing a plugin/workflow to do this.
Have a look at this solution: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Change-Dynamics-CRM-2013-a6beb85e
In your case, you just need to update processid and stageid fields to null, then the annoying warning will disappear.
Good luck!
Are you looking at the complete list of Processes under Customisations? If you're looking at an unmanaged solution it won't appear unless it's been added to that solution. It's in there OOB and called Opportunity Sales Process, I just deactivated it on a clean org. No need to delete it, just deactivate it or edit as required.
There are two things that can be done for any business process flow in MS CRM:
Deactivate BPF
Delete BPF
In order to remove Business Process Flow (BPF) from existing records, it is not enough to just deactivate BPF. Even when we deactivate BPF, records that are associated with it will still show BPF with warning message that it is deactivated.
It is true, if you delete BPF from Processes in MS Dynamics CRM, they will be removed (not showed) from the records that were associated with that BPF. However, what if you do not want to delete default BPFs, like those related to sales process on system entities (Leads, Opportunities and Accounts)? What if you want to hide these default system BPF from default system entity (i.e. Opportunity)?
In this case you need to write plugin/workflow activity to remove association of the entity record from BPF.
See my GitHub example how to do this
This MS CRM community post is also useful:
Remove business Process Flow from Account
I've got a lookup field on Account entity called something. Each such Something has a reference to an account. When my users click the magnifying glass, I want them to see a list of available Something records but filtered to view only such instances that link to the currently treated entity.
Also, I'll need to design such a filtration for Contact instances to only show the Something records that are related to the account that the currently regarded contact is a member of.
I can't decide between a plugin on Retrieve and some JS in OnLoad registering a fetchXML. All such operations will be done client-side. The solution needs only to work in CRM13 (and if possible apply some cool functionality in that version).
Suggestions?
JavaScript & FetchXml are your best option here as with a Retrieve plugin you're taking the performance hit of executing on every retrieve regardless of whether the entity is being retrieved for the lookup. A filtered lookup in JS only applies for those scenarios that require a change to the field on Account.
Another other good reason for using a filtered lookup in Js is they are now a supported feature in CRM 2013 as opposed to the "hack" that was required in 2011.
Some more info on addPreSearch and addCustomFilter can be found on MSDN and there's a decent blog post providing examples here.
I was wondering if anyone could possibly help me with my SharePoint 2010 issue. I recently created a CRM System within SharePoint for my small business which utilizes a email notification workflow. The workflow is triggered when the 'Action Needed' field has a 'yes' value, this means that 2 days after the information is created or edited the workflow will notify the particular user that further action is needed.
Previous thread with image of the workflow
Now this is great if myself or other members of the team are only inputting a couple of items but I found out the hard way when i keyed in 20 or so items and received 20 individual emails which is irritating as you can imagine.
So on to my issue, I would like the email notifications to be grouped together in one email so it's more efficient and avoids the need for individual emails. So when one particular user creates or edits multiple records instead of separate email notifications I would like it all in one email. So is this possible while using SharePoint workflows? If it is possible and how would I go about expanding my current workflow to achieve this?
I have already asked this question in the dedicated SharePoint area to no prevail, I could really do with the help also if what I am asking is impossible then could someone at least say so.
Thanks very much to anyone who contributes and helps me with my problem.
If you are using SharePoint Designer , then this is not problem. This is because each workflow can access the data on which List Item the workflow is triggered.
However, this is definitely possible using a custom workflow or an event Receiver.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms437502(v=office.14).aspx
The project that I'm currently on is consuming a large volume of 3rd-party information exposed via APIs. These datasets are constantly changing and in the order of millions of entries for each.
Users are to denote their favorites and recall that data when they need it. An example may be that the user wants to "bookmark" an inventory level to their "analyze later" list.
My current thinking is that during actions like searching users are presented with "live" data from the 3rd parties. If they flag something they're interested in I copy that data to a database I control. Subsequent views of that info are served from my database, not the 3rd party, since the 3rd party entry may change (or cease to exist entirely).
Is this good API practice? What object keys are sent to the client-facing application on search? The 3rd party keys? Or do I preprocess the results of a search and determine which items I have locally, thus returning local keys in those instances? Or do I completely abstract the 3rd party sources and generate unique local keys for every returned item, which is then subsequently used if someone saves [that seems REALLY heavy, tho]? Or do I put that processing off and do the lookup as to whether something exists locally to after someone bookmarks something?
I am looking for a way or a plugin so that trac sends me email about the number of new or closed tickets (and some information about these tickets also ) for a specific duration lets say for the last three days.
Basically I need to know how many tickets have been created in last week and how many of them have been closed at the end of week.
Of course the email only should be sent to the admin and not to all the users.
For additional Trac funcionality we have Trac plugins, yes. And the first place to look for them is trac-hacks.org .
The excellent TagsPlugin in use overthere already delivers some hints on resources tagged with notification or notifications. The most comprehensive and mature solution is certainly TracAnnouncer with a just reworked configuration interface providing a highly sophisticated opt-in and opt-out subscription system. Unfortunately digest notification are not integrated today.
Still there are other plugins, that fill in the gap, i.e. check the XMailPlugin. It claims to do configurable instant, daily and weekly notifications, so this may be for you. Since this is a relativly new plugin, you should expect some pending issues, but the author might be very open to your suggestion. If you're becoming a heavy user giving valuable test feedback and a bit lucky too, asking kindly could be enought to make things happen.
There's a slightly different way to solve this problem that doesn't require any plugins. First, create a custom "timeline" view that displays the information that you want. In your example, this would be all "opened and closed tickets" starting from "today" and going back three days. When viewing this custom view, you should see a link at the bottom of the page that says "RSS Feed" (on my system, the resulting URL looks something like this: http://myserver/timeline?ticket=on&max=50&authors=&daysback=3&format=rss). Click on this link to subscribe to the feed using your web browser, email client, or other program capable of reading feeds. Now, you can view the results live at any time. What you can do at this point is only limited by the capabilities of your feed reader app, but most can at least be configured to notify you when the feed is updated.