MSDN Solution Architecture Center: Extending Enterprise Applications with Microsoft Outlook: Architectural Design Guide

MSDN Solution Architecture Center: Extending Enterprise Applications with Microsoft Outlook: Architectural Design Guide

"Summary: Provides an architectural design and sample code that demonstrates an approach for integrating enterprise CRM and other LOB application data into the Microsoft Outlook user interface. (20 printed pages)

Click here to download The CRM Integration for Outlook sample.

Contents

Executive Summary
Introduction
Motivation and Business Challenges
Exposing CRM Data by Using Web Services
Using Microsoft Outlook as the Integration Point
Technical Architecture Overview
Architectural Components Discussion
Benefits
Conclusion
Companion Resources

Executive Summary

Many organizations have made multi-million dollar investments in customer relationship management (CRM) systems and other line of business (LOB) applications over the last decade. Although many of these applications have delivered significant business benefits, some organizations have found that these bespoke systems have not provided the expected returns on investment. One of the argued reasons for this is that specialized enterprise systems, databases, and applications do not integrate well with information worker workflows.

This paper is the first in a series of papers presenting an architectural design guide and sample application that demonstrates an approach for integrating enterprise CRM and other LOB applications with Microsoft Outlook. The guidance in this paper originated from Microsoft's Project Elixir, an internal Microsoft IT initiative to integrate critical customer data with Outlook. The design uses Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office (VSTO), Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (SQL Server Express), and Web services.

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Here's a great summary from the TheServerSide.Net article,

"Microsoft has published documentation and source code for an internal project that uses Visual Studio Tools for Office to integrate data from their CRM system directly into Outlook 2003. The documentation for project "Elixir" includes and architectural Design Guide, and integration overview, and local data store synchronization. Sample code is also available for download.

Microsoft needed to make the customer data in its Siebel solution more accessible and actionable to the company's 8,000-member sales force. As part of its Project Elixir effort, Microsoft developed Customer Explorer, a smart client application that uses Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 to provide access to customer data in several back-end systems.

The add-in for Outlook that Microsoft created uses web services to retrieve account and contact specific information and display it to the salesperson within Outlook, right next to their daily appointments and schedule. Data is stored locally in Outlook storage as well as a SQL Express database.

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And people say MS doesn't itself use .Net. Well a .Net app (addin, app... same diff) being deployed for real world usage to 8K people (sales people at that ;) seems like using it to me... But that's just me.

Anyway there's a some good info in this document and the other related doc's...

(via TheServerSide.Net - Microsoft Releases Details of Project Elixir:VSTO Outlook Add-in)