Welcome to Office Mechanics coming up on today's show we're going to take a look at how
how you can extend
Office 365 with new popular SaaS applications
we'll also take a look at how you can connect to Office 365 services
so stay tuned
Microsoft Office
Office Mechanics
So I'm joined by Chris Johnson, Welcome. Thanks very much. Thanks for having me on the show
So what's changed? what's new with the new developer model with Office?
So Office is all about developers being able to extend and connect to Office 365
and so by that we mean extend the Office applications to add new capabilities
new functionality and things like that and then when we talk about connecting
to Office 365
we mean connecting from things like web applications, mobile phone applications
or other line of business systems
to get access to all the rich data in Office 365. We've been making a ton of
momentum lately in terms of having a lot of the most frequently used SaaS
application builders out there
integrate with Office right? Absolutely and we're going to see a whole lot of these
today we're going to walk through some examples of some
great work that our partner organizations have been working on
So let's take a look at some of the examples that we have, that we talked about this week
and last week
cause this is really exciting stuff some of the most major
apps that people are thinking about today using in business as well as in
their private lives
Salesforce.com, SAP, Uber, really cool in terms of extending the Office
experience
why don't we stop talking to our slide here and actually show a couple
demonstrations of
these really great SaaS applications that are integrating with Office 365
Okay so where we're going to start first
is on my PC. So first off I'm going to show you an example from
SAP that we're working on. So let's start on Excel here. So this is Excel
the client on the desktop right. So the Excel most people used to seeing
down the right hand side you can see the SAP integration add-in
and now this is working with SAP data
on premises using the SAP gateway for Microsoft
so what I can do here is come into Excel
connect to data in SAP and manipulate and work with it
in the application I like to work with data and report on it and
pivot on it and so forth
but these don't just work in the Excel
applications on a desktop. Right! Because SAP, in this case they want to be able to
make sure that they're there pervasively across all the different
Excel experiences so
a lot of people are using Excel online for example
in order to be able to modify, edit spread sheets, we have that
integration as well right? Exactly right, so if I flip over to that same
spreadsheet in Excel online
you see the add-in down the right hand side just the same as you would on the
desktop
and the way that this is enabled is our new add-in framework is based on web technologies so
no longer the old com add-ins of old these are built using HTML and
JavaScript which means we can run them in the browser when you're in Excel online as well
but even going beyond what we can do on the PC or in a browser which by the way
isn't necessarily on a PC could be on another device type,
we also have
native app for Office running other platforms in this case iOS
and we also have the ability to actually have that SAP app run
in Excel coming very soon right? That's right, so last week at build we announce
new capabilities for add-ins to run an Office for iPad
so the first application that shipping with is Excel
so people will see an update for Excel coming soon which will enable this
add-in. So if we flip to our iPad here so is just a blank spreadsheet but I can come
into the Insert tab
and say 'add-ins', I want to add the SAP add-in
right in line on the right hand side here, I can come down to my product data
I can click on that, I want to bring it into my Excel spreadsheet and manipulate it
and report on it
I click connect, you'll see that data flow fly right into the Excel spreadsheet
up here on the iPad now I can come along and edit this data
often people want to work with the data in Excel and report on it and so forth
so if I come in here and change some data let's change this from
3.5 to say 200 that's going to be really expensive milk
and if I come in here I can also do, before I say that back up to the server
and I wanna see what's changed,
I just wanna be sure my edits are okay so I can come in here and click compare and
save
and I'll get a little report in the add-in that says row number three
I've changed from 3.5 which is the data in SAP
to now two hundred in Excel so I can come in here and tap which one
I'd like to stick with
and then save it up to SAP when I'm done. That's really great so we're seeing a
lot of great extensibility. The thing that
is really excited about these new apps, new add-ins,
is the fact that it is actually cross platform now because we're using a
effectively I-frames in order to have that integration work it means that
we're not using
the older add-in model that we had for example in Office on the desktop
this is why we moved on to a new model where we can actually
work in the desktop, work in the browser work on the iPad but beyond just
data management and really doing what we're doing here in Excel
our daily lives looking on things like our calendar, our mail, we've also got a
lot of exciting updates there as well right? Absolutely let's flip back to the
PC here and take a look at Outlook
and I'll share a couple examples of applications we've been working on with
some great partners
around those scenarios. So the first one that's actually live
in the Office store today is Salesforce. Okay. When you working with mail
often in Outlook, you want to look up contacts from Salesforce potentially
account information from Salesforce
as well as things like opportunities. So if I come in here to a mail
from, in fact myself, in this case and open the Salesforce app up
I can get access to this rich data from Salesforce right in line and in context
in Outlook so it looks at my details from Salesforce
I can see the contact information I can see account information
it's beautiful and touch friendly so it works great on a surface without a keyboard
for example
I can see my opportunities that I'm working on any cases associated with it
so works nice and in line in context with my mail and it means I don't have to switch
between applications to look this data up or out work with other applications
really great even beyond that though there are some really great apps and add-in
and out there that
really help your email experience things like boomerang as well right? Exactly
right so
boomerang is a really popular service that helps you work with email
often I'll send somebody an email to say hey I need some
information about something or please go and do this
but then I have to put that as a task in some other system to remind me to
to follow up with that person. Right. So what boomerang lets me do
is when I'm composing an email I can add the boomerang add-in down the right hand
side here
and simply tick this box that says remind me
in, and I can configure what the time period happens to be
whether that be four hours or a few days or a month, when to remind me
and what it will do is put this email back in my inbox when it's
when it's when the time comes
and it prompts me in reminds me to go and follow up with that person. That's
really great that's going to help you manage your communication to make sure
you can get back to the things that you might have forgotten otherwise without it
but even beyond that one of the apps I bet a lot of people are even using
this week here in Chicago
the Uber app we can do things with that as well right? Exactly
so Uber is a great car or ride sharing service
that gets you places right? And often with meetings
you have the meeting in your calendar but you have to look at your calendar and then have a
task reminder to tell you to go order a car or something along those lines
we've been working with Uber to make an Uber add-in
Outlook that will mean that Uber will prompt you
say 15, forty-five minutes before you're meeting
to order a car. So I can come into the Uber app here and I simply
just set my phone number
and this case let me just type in a number here
and say set reminder and then the background i can set the ride
reminder time, so in this case forty-five minutes before my meeting
Uber on my phone is going to send a notification and it's really simple to
order a car you simply slide to ride
now the important part here is that it's not just the Uber application that most
people are familiar with today
we have to type in your destination because it's embedded in Outlook we're
able to take the meeting location
from the appointment and Uber pre-populates in their applications so
they pull it through and you don't have to re-key
things on the fly. That's really cool exciting new API's but even beyond
what we're seeing here on the business side with Outlook.com
we're also extending that as well right? That's right so in the future you'll see
these add-ins
quickly coming to Outlook.com for 400 million
users on our consumer mail service as well as in the commercial
service in Office 365. So beyond what we are showing here in terms of
extending the Office experiences we also have additional things that we can do
to connect to the backend services that are running Office 365 so let me take a
look at a few things there cause I now
a lot of new stuff if you're not aware of the app launcher etc
we can do not only that but the APIs that we can call to get into the back end
services. Yeah absolutely so although the examples I've shown you so far all the Office
client applications
I just want to show you a quick example of what we doing to extending the
experience
in Office 365 in the browser through the app launcher
so you're probably familiar with the app launcher
in Office 365 it shows you all the great first party apps that are available like mail
calendar, people, OneDrive and so forth but for developers it's also
they're also able to drop their applications on this app launcher a good
example of this
would be maybe putting your Intranet as a tile on the app launcher
it can also be used for third-party applications
that you want put in front of users in this way
so down in the bottom right it's a little hard see here the my apps
button and if you click on that it'll take you through to a page where
could see all of the applications you have access to
we pull this information from Active Directory or Azure Active Directory I
should say
and it will show you not only the first party applications you're allowed to get
access to
but third party ones that you might have registered for as well so at the top of the
page you can see mail, calendar. people and so forth
but at the bottom you can see Do DocuSign and Smartsheet
and these are partners that have added Azure Active Directory authentication
which means that people can go and log in with their Office 365 credentials
to those applications and you can even pin them right to that
initial start experience as well right? Exactly, right. So we come in
and pick Do here and say pin to app launcher
and when that's done I can get quick access right off the app launcher here
so this is done using Azure Active Directory authentication
were able to smartly pull those in but there's more that comes with this as well
once a partner or once a developer has built this off
into their application we can do smart things like single sign-on
so once they're in Office 365 they tap this button they'll get seamless authenication
right across into the partner application
or maybe some other line of business system that they've built. So it's like
right integrated directly into the Office
365 portal and console there other is it also integrates with my app side on the
Azure portal as well so
very great integration across that but I know even beyond that you can also build
your own custom apps that
draw into those Office 365 APIs and services as well, right. Exactly, let's
use Do as an example here so if I tap the Do button it's going to launch a
new tab in log me into Do
now for those of you who don't know Do, Do.com is
their site they're a great partner that builds on the meeting experience
they help you arrange
agendas and tasks and outcomes from meetings
you can share it with others outside your organization as well so it helps make
the meeting experience much nicer
but what do does on the backend is use our calendar
API to call into Office 365
and pull a list of meetings from your Exchange calendar
so here in Do on Thursday the 7th I can see I have a couple of meetings set up
I've got the Ignite studio session that we're doing here today we've got the
attendee party tonight
as I scroll down I can see some other meetings that I've got set up in my
calendar, you can also set up new meetings here and the'll push back
into the calendar as well so it's bi-directional sync
so what they're doing is they're using your Office 365
authentication token that you've granted this app
access to, in this case, I've just said please just get access to just my calendar
so they don't have access to everything in 365 just the things
you have consented to and they are using that calendar API on the backend
to dive in there and grab this information but this
goes beyond just calendars we've got APIs for
email, calendar, people
search, text, all sorts of different rich APIs you can call
as well as things like OfficeGraph. Really great stuff we can
not only extend Office but we can also connect to the Office services
and you can use the tools and platforms that you want to use and develop
these types add-in these types of experiences that we're showing here
today but
if I'm a developer where do I go to get started
The simplest thing that you can do is just go to dev.office.com
you can sign up for our developer program we're giving everybody a free Office 365
develop a subscription for a year
it's the best way to get started in Office 365. Get up and running.
Really good stuff so dev.office.com also any news as it breaks we're going to
have that on the Office blog on Wednesdays on Office Mechanics
that's about all time we have for today thank you for watching and goodbye for now
Office Mechanics
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