Microsoft Dynamics Snap apps

If you want people to use the core applications you invested in (such as CRM and ERP), it is a good idea to integrate them into a familiar interface. Most people tend to use Office applications quite a lot in their daily job so why not integrate your CRM and ERP from within Office. Dynamics Snap applications show how information workers can work with data out of Dynamics CRM and Dynamics from within their Office applications (This is what Microsoft calls a Office Business Applications or OBA)

One that I tried out recently - Microsoft Dynamics Snap for Microsoft Dynamics AX on Codeplex – of which the current release supports Dynamics AX 2009. There are two different snaps available for Dynamics AX 2009:

• Offline Expense - This snap-in enables expenses to be entered in Excel while disconnected from the corporate network, and then posted to Dynamics AX at a later time. This snap-in uses WCF-based services and LINQ to retrieve data from Dynamics AX, and uses the Application Integration Framework, or AIF to send business documents to Dynamics AX.
• Business Data Lookup (BDL) - This snap-in enables information workers to access data from Dynamics AX from within Excel, Word and Outlook. This snap-in is an upgrade of the BDL snap-in that was distributed with Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0.

Unfortunately the Microsoft Dynamics Snap Team Blog doesn't show any activity since january 2007

References:

• Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics AX Integration Scenarios White Paper
• More about OBA and RAPs
• Office Business Applications – Crossing the chasm
• OBA Composition Reference Toolkit

Tags van Technorati: dynamics+ax,dynamics+crm,oba,microsoft,dynamics+snap,snap,codeplex