Can a Microsoft Find Time poll be embedded into a web page? - outlook

Is it technically possible to use the plugin Microsoft Find Time for an iframe embed to schedule a Microsoft Teams meeting together in a Microsoft Outlook calendar with other accounts using external e-mail addresses?
What other free or commercial tools come to your mind for such a use case, preferrably with location in EU and fully compliant to EU-GDPR with a template of what to add in the data privacy statement.
One tool I already know, but which can't be customized enough for the given use case is Appointlet.
Also, a Microsoft Bookings licence is currently no option.
Are there equal or better alternatives?
Kind regards and thanks,

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Dynamics 365 Team license alternative

Recently Microsoft announced some changes to their Dynamics 365 Teams license. The people who have these licenses will not be able to access Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, custom model driven apps etc and will have their own app like Sales Team member app.
These dedicated apps have restrictions of only 15 custom entities.
This change will cause some of our clients a lot of problems. As per my understanding, the only option they will have is to buy the full Dynamics license.
Am I correct on above? If no then feel free to correct me. If yes then can anyone suggest a good alternative?
Yes, the new licensing model is quite confusing.
I suggest to check the updated licensing guide (if not already done)
https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=866544
(if the link does not work, it is taken from here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2020wave1/dynamics365-sales/license-enforcement-users-new-team-member-licenses)
Allthough this document is quite extensive, it is also recommended to talk with you MS Sales Rep (or anyone else who is responsible for you from MS side) to make sure all your needs are covered.

Can I use CalDAV with Outlook for free?

Can I use CalDAV with Outlook without buying additional software?
I found many resources where says, that if you want use CalDAV with Outlook, you need pay. Is it really so?
Outlook does not support CalDAV out of the box, you need a plugin / extra software.
There are commercial offerings for such as well as open source offerings (e.g. you can find https://github.com/aluxnimm/outlookcaldavsynchronizer using a simple search in your favourite search engine).
However, this isn't a programming question and doesn't belong here.

WP7 - selling extensions

I'm trying to create some application for Windows Phone >= 7.1
During plannin my work and specyfiong technical requirements I've come across one problem.
I wan't to have free application with basic functionality. And then it should be extendable with some non-free extensions (dlls?, databases?, SaaS?)
Is it possible at the moment to use some MS api/app/etc. to be able to publish such extensions and sell them? What is the best way to do this if there is more than one solution?
Thank you for any help.
As of right now (June 2012), in-app purchases are not supported. Your only choices, then are being a paid app and supporting trial mode.
The only way you can do this at present is to handle the additional purchases yourself.
You'd have to set up a website which customers could create an account on and purchase extensions through, then have them also log into your app with those account details to determine what additional data to download or functions to enable.
You could be smart and include the website functionality into your app with a browser control. Take a look at the Amazon Kindle app for an example of how they accomplish it.

How to write a custom sync provider for Outlook Contacts?

Can anyone point me to an example of an Outlook Contact custom sync provider for the Microsoft Sync Framework? I would like to use that Framework to build a bidirectional sync between my CRM and Outlook. I've found a reference to this SO question: Sync Microsoft Outlook with my own data
Unfortunately, the link to MSDN example is no longer valid. It simply redirects to the MSDN sample gallery which has no such sample.
Any help would be much appreciated.
I am very curious to what the link was to, as well. I have not found anything short of either a "Wrapped PST Store" or "Custom MAPI Store" or "Custom MAPI Transport Provider". MAPI itself provides a synchronization process, but it is not designed to be used from managed code and is very complicated.
The best "roundup" I have found is the Outlook MAPI Samples on codeplex. These do not deal with any pretty "Sync Framework" though; presumably that is used as the back-end? (Most samples neglect how to get to the back-end processing.)
We are evaluating an entirely managed in-Addin synchronization process here to avoid having to deal with the complications of MAPI, but the viability is still not entirely known. (This approach also introduces different problems and limitations.)
Good luck and happy coding.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a software development platform?

My organisation is in the final stages of acquiring CRM 4.0 for use as a general purpose software development platform. The company who is selling it to us has convinced upper management that CRM will solve all our productivity problems and make software development as easy as point and click. (They don't read Brooks.)
Having resigned to the fact that I can't stop CRM from being foisted upon us developers, I have been doing research on how to manage the complexities of large scale CRM development.
I have so far identified the following complexities that need to be addressed:
CRM seems wholly incompatible with basic configuration management practices.
Keeping the black box CRM database in bidirectional synchronisation with external LOB systems is both very hard and critical to project success.
What other complexities must I take into account when building a large scale CRM application?
What limitations does CRM have as a development platform?
Edit: This topic provided additional insight.
I've worked with MS CRM 3.0 and now 4.0 here's my take:
Whenever possible focus on standard best practices. Don't get overly confused by what CRM is doing or wants you to do.
Don't be afraid to break what's "supported" by MS. With some caveats on 2 major factors - will your company let you think outside the box to solve problems and do customizations/integrations that are not officially supported? - and are you comfortable enough with .Net, SQL, javascript etc to weave through their code and implement what you need?
I have sometimes banged me head 100 times trying to do something in a "supported" fashion when one small tweak to a js file here or a small db modification there gave me what I needed.
If constant data integration with other LOB apps is critical you should consider a 3rd party tool like Scribe (http://www.scribesoft.com/). It's not cheap but can basically get you 90% of the way when it comes to integrating with your other LOB apps.
As a general rule, MS CRM is great at contact management - doing things like tracking appointments, doing mail merges, etc. Could you use it as your core HR system - probably. Finance system - maybe a bit more difficult. The further you go from it's core competency of performing contact management the more custom work you'll have to do. The more custom work you have to do the more you should consider if MS CRM is the right solution to that problem.
I know you're likely well underway into your deployment of Dynamics CRM, but just a few quick tips:
I'd avoid making unsupported changes purely because it becomes too hard to track the changes eventually. Since Dynamics CRM allows developers to make C# Plugins and access to web services, it's usually unnecessary to make unsupported changes for anything non-trivial. Plus you run the roulette of having to hide changes from MS if you have to call their support. I know many people will include external javascript files (jquery, etc) and other somewhat benign changes, but try to mentally stop yourself when an unsupported edit involves anything non-visual.
Look into the phrase Microsoft Dynamics Xrm, there are several books on the subject that are excellent, http://www.thecrmbook.com/ is particularly good because it comes with some nice custom code to use with your CRM.
Source Control your customizations xml's and don't let people touch the database, also, Google Halan CRM tool, and use it for scripting out CRM customizations and javascript files. Easier than writing custom powershell scripts to do the same job.
Transaction Support
If your application require transaction support from the underlying platform, Dynamics CRM is not the correct choice. The reason is because currently Dynamics CRM SDK web service doesn't support transaction.
The reference thread is here : Does MSCRM web-service support database transactions?
Since you would like to utilize Dynamics CRM as a platform, that means all the business logic should utilize Dynamics CRM SDK Web Services as data access layer. But imagine without the transaction support and you're invoking a series of web service calls as a unit of work, and one of the web service calls fails. That means you potentially will encounter data integrity issue.
Configuration
Usually i create a custom entity called Configuration, which will store all the necessary related configuration for the current CRM application. After it has been created, you can use Dynamics CRM SDK Web Service to read all the necessary configurations from the Configuration custom entity

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