I was just introduced to the concept of Outlook forms. I don't know if this will solve my problem but here is what I want to do:
I want to be able to have employees who are inside the company fill out some forms. So all I have to do is create the form and PUSH it to their Outlook? After they fill out the form, can I capture the data somehow? Has anyone does this before? Can someone recommend a good tutorial/examples?
Update: The Outlook->Access option seems like a great one, but it seems like the form must be emailed by someone. In other words, if someone wants to fill out any form they first have to be emailed a form. What if a person wants to just fill out a form? How would he do it if he has no access to the Access database?
Here are three options:
This page is a really good jump page for custom forms in Outlook. In fact, that whole site is pretty good with lots of examples and links like Outlook Forms Step-by-Step Tutorial.
However, if you also have Access 2007, I'd actually recommend something simpler and easier to create email forms that can be sent to users and collect back all of the information. Once I discovered this in Access 2007 I never went back to custom Outlook forms.
Basically, you create an Access db with the data you want to collect and then in the "External Data" tab in Access 2007, you click "Create E-mail" and a wizard will walk you through creating an email with the form in the body (which is either HTML or InfoPath, depending on which one you choose). You send this to your users (you can have a recipient list in a table as well in your Access DB) and they fill out the form (I used it for surveys) and then they click submit. It goes back to your Outlook in a special folder and as soon as you open Outlook, it will synch it with the database. Then you can slice and dice all of that database information.
Here are some great tutorials on this:
Demo: Collect data in Access 2007 by
using e-mail
How to integrate Microsoft Access
and Outlook 2007
Finally, if you just want to collect back much simpler information, like "Yes", "No", "Maybe", the easiest way is to create voting buttons. Go to New Message -> Options - Voting Buttons. You can customize this if needed by separating your choices with a semi-colon ;.
In #2 and #3 above, these are scenarios to initiate data collection.
There are other situations where someone doesn't need a prompt via email to fill something out right there, but rather just submit a form (like an expense report, or a gas mileage report). #1 above (Outlook custom forms) is generally better choice in that scenario, but:
Outlook forms have typically been
harder to deploy and teach people to
use (there are things like "public
forms", "private forms", etc.)
Outlook forms have been, in practice,
been replaced by other technologies.
In particular, InfoPath/Forms Server and
Sharepoint Forms. This is because neither
of those two technologies requires
users to do a whole lot other than
follow a link to fill out a form. I used to know, about 10 years ago, many companies who tried to use Outlook forms and most of them gave up development of them in favor of other technologies.
This isn't to say that Outlook forms are bad in any way. If you don't have other technologies available to serve as a Forms Server, then this could be a decent option to consider.
To look at other semi-lightweight ways of form submission, you can use MS Word templates as the front end and have them update an Access DB. Here are a couple of good articles on this:
Import Data Directly from Word
Forms to Access Tables
How do I... Transfer data from a
Word form to an Access database?
Related
Users at our organization need to create word documents from templates. In the document there should be their name, their phone number and email address. Unfortunately in MS Word "user information" only contains the users name, initials and mailing address. So I can't use "normal fields", I think.
Until now, we used a autoexec() word macro / vba script that read the user's information (phone, email, Name) from local AD/LDAP when opening the template and replaced some placeholders in the document template. The user then saved this document as a copy. This solution worked quite well when everyone was working on a domain joined windows computer within the company network. Now people work via word online, iPads, from outside the company network and so on..
Of course one could generate the document via web app or powershell and do a search / replace but that would break the users known workflow. They are already "a bit challenged" by all the changes that came through the switch from good old mapped network drives to sharepoint online etc.
Therefore I'd like to find a solution that looks and works similarly to what they're used to.
Maybe an office add-in that offers templates in a pane with data prefilled from graph api would be an option. Thanks #Tiny-wa for the suggestion.
I really appreciate any hints. Thanks a lot in advance!
I need to have an office add-in component (https://dev.office.com/getting-started/addins ) to allow user to select a contact from the global address book to insert that contact email in the word document.
Any suggestions if this can be done with office add-ins? if yes how can it be done? or it must be VSTO?
An Office Add-in is simply a web app (that happens to run in the context of an Office host), so you can design it to do the types of things that a web app can do, including issuing requests against REST APIs. Regarding the scenario you've described, I'd view it as 3 distinct tasks:
Get contact info from AD.
Present list of contacts to user (so they can select one).
Insert email address of selected contact into document.
1- Getting contact info:
Re the specific scenario that you've described, I'd suggest that you investigate the feasibility of using either the Microsoft Graph API or the Azure Active Directory Graph API to get contact information from the GAL. Please note that, in general, using Microsoft Graph is recommended over using Azure AD Graph.
2- Presenting list of contacts to the User:
Regarding UI design, because your Office Add-in is simply a web app, you can present the list of contacts to the user in whatever manner that your web app supports.
3- Inserting text into the Word document:
Regarding inserting text into the document when the user selects a contact via the Add-in UI, you'll use the Word JavaScript API to do this. If you haven't used the Word JavaScript API before, I'd suggest that you start by doing the Word Add-in quickstart, which shows how to insert text at various points in a document. Then, for additional details about the API, see the Word JavaScript API reference docs. (Which API operation you use to insert text into the document will depend the specifics of your implementation. I'd suggest that you post a separate Stack Overflow question that describes specifically what you want to achieve re insertion of text into the document, if you need help with that when the time comes.)
First of all, I have to say that I am NET developer (C#) and my knowledge on Dynamics 365 is pretty limited. Nevertheless my employer thought that I am good enough to make that thingy from post title :)
After couple of hours researching and reading, I found this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LwZLoXS6jo which address on how to create and send SMS from Dynamics. I am aware that this require me to create new Dynamics entities, at least SMSMessage and SMSMessageTemplate, but at least I found out how to do this :)
I understood everything stated there, but as i already said, due to my lack of knowledge on Dynamics 365, I got problems with (probably) basic things regarding Dynamics.
Here are those problems:
1. As far as I can tell, in order to build SMS gateway, first thing I need to do is to add new menu item inside Dynamics 365. I presume that this new menu item should reside inside 'Contacts' menu (contacts.jpg, marked with red box) but I am not sure on how to achieve this. Please note, I do not want someone to provide me with some magic solution, I just need someone to provide me with valid links that I can use to learn about this and solve my own problem :)
2. When new menu item is in place, and user click on it, I would like to open up a form for user to select SMS template that will be used and maybe setup some other values. Same again, U do not need to help me with exact code, just with some usable links :)
3. Inside that form that user will open on menu click, I would like to know how to get list of selected contacts (from grid at contact.jpg)
When I (finally) have that list of contacts, I will create SMS entities mentioned above (video link) and everything will fall in place and (hopefully) work.
I am aware that this is probably too much to ask, cause Dynamics 365 is rather complex, and people are spending great amounts of money and their time learning to became Dynamics developers, but without help, Dynamics is making me running in circles chasing my own tail :) and getting nowhere.
Also, I will be using online Dynamics 365 so bare in mind that any solution should work with it.
if any of U think that I missed or got something wrong, please let me know.enter image description here
So basically to get you started, you should:
1) Create a solution in Settings => Customizations => Solutions
2) Add contact entity to that solution (by choosing "Add existing" under Entities pane). Don't click "Add all assets" you will need only contact metadata to get going
3) Create jScript file and add a web resource to CRM (nothing really complicated, just go to web resources in you solution and click "Add new" and specify type of your web resource as jScript and target your file).
4) Now download http://www.xrmtoolbox.com
5) For now you are interested only in plugin "Ribbon Workbench"
6) Now simply choose your solution and contact - you will see command bars for contact homepage, list and form. This is pretty strainghtforward - simply drag and drop a button wherever you like, create a command using workbench and bind the button with the command (simply choose it from a drop-down). The command you are interested in is Custom Javacript. Here you specify your web resource and name of the function that you want to call. You can also specify parameters that should be passed inside your function for example ids of selected items (if you are on the list of records).
There are many approaches to fulfil your specific needs, but being able to call a custom javascript function from a button should be a good starting point, the rest is simply the knowledge of CRM SDK, so how to create an entity using API or open a form or open a web resource - everything is very well documented and you can get it simply by asking google, so I will not post any blog here, not to advertise too much. Also I's suggest downloading latest CRM SDK (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=50032) - you have many sample code there, regarding plugins and some form modifications, you should also check this out.
To make it easier for you, you should refer to this "menu" as "Command bar" or "Ribbon", so rather look for "adding custom button to command bar CRM 2016" and you will be all good. Also to make a form for choosing a template, you will probably need some custom web resource, so "creating custom html5 web resource CRM 2016" should give you some good examples.
I'm using the data collection features available through Microsoft Access 2007 and Microsoft Outlook 2007 to send out an email and collect data from the recipient. The data is then stored in an Access Table.
The feature that I am using is explained here pretty well: Collecting Data Using Email
The issue that I have run into is that other than the email address, there's no way to customize the email that is being distributed. What I'm hoping to accomplish is the ability to essentially do a mail merge of sorts to personalize the email. This doesn't seem possible using the wizard approached described in the attached article. Is this something that I could accomplish via Visual Basic or some other means within MS Office.
If you've chosen the HTML-option you will get only text boxes and there is no way to customise the email if sent directly from Access. If you do not specify an email address, Access will generate the email so that you can type in the recipient - you can customise the email at that point.
If you do want all the fancy stuff (ie, customising the email, using drop downs, yes/no buttons, validation etc) then you'll need to use InfoPath as a source (again, if using Access). That's the application where you can build your form using validation and controls. The disadvantage is that the recipient needs to have InfoPath installed on their machine.
You could of course create an application to loop through your records and you can customise the HTML as much as you like then, this is probably best done outside of Office.
I'm interested in automating some reactive work I do when receiving certain emails in one of my email accounts. What I would like to have happen is:
On receipt of new email in the account
If the new email passes the "Need to React" criteria (based on body content and subject line)
3a. Scrape some content out of the email body and subject lines
3b. Populate a template form (e.g. Excel spreadsheet) with the scraped data
3c. Print the populated form and save the populated form in some folder (e.g. as a pdf)
What's the best (defined as easiest to implement by myself) approach / combination of technologies for achieving this automation?
i have not done exactly what you are asking, but I know Microsoft Outlook has a Rules engine that can take incoming messages, check for various content, and then do various actions including running applications and/or scripts.
You should look at Visual Studio Tools for Office if you are a c# person.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsto/default
You can write an Outlook add-on that can do pretty much everything you have outlined above.