Office Live is starting a program to get solution developers on our vNext platform, and we want YOU!  Check out this link to find the complete description of the Microsoft Office Live Early Adopter Program, who should apply, and links to documentation and the application.

We'll be looking through the applicants and notifying the candidates in the next month or two, so do it now to make sure we consider you and/or your dev shop.  The deadline for applications is 9/15/06.

This is essentially the next step from the pilot program we ran earlier this year, expanded out to include a lot more folks.  We expect to give EAP participants access to our vNext service before anyone else, and we of course hope to get valuable feedback from your experience working with it.  In return, you can be the first out of the gate with a custom solution after we launch to market to your customers.

The EAP owes a debt of gratitude to the OL pilot partners who went before you.  They really paid the price in the pilot program, developing their solutions on a version of our vNext release that was much less complete than it is now.  How's that saying go... bleeding edge?

- Chris, Program Manager

Learning new Business Applications may seem like a lot of work when added to the other things you do in running your business. But here’s a thought: Business Applications are just different ways of associating information, in many cases information that you already have in Office Live. Applications can save you and your co-workers time, work, and a lot of memorization.

In the April 28^th post to this blog, Tara makes an essential point: “Don't look at the [Business] applications and try to conform to them…” Think of your unique business needs and then see if any of the applications that Office Live furnishes helps manage those needs. If you can’t find one, consider modifying it, or even create your own application, which is what we’re going to do today. In this post we’ll look at how to create a custom list in Office Live Essentials that would help with a real business need if your business has a number of employees. Although in this case our list has to do with real estate, this kind of list could be used for almost any business.

The employees in our small real estate office have complained that it is really cumbersome to look up and associate which salesperson and customer are associated with each house our staff has sold. As it is now, this data is kept in several tables. What we need is a table that shows it all, but there wasn’t an existing list of this kind among the ones that came with Office Live. We’ll create our own custom list. After it’s done, we’ll post it to the company view of the Dashboard so it will be easily visible to all our employees when they sign in to their views of Business Applications. Please follow along on your site so you can see how easy it is.

Sign in to your Essentials site, click Business Applications in Member Center, and then click Site Settings. (To see Site Settings, make sure you are on the Overview page, not Dashboard). In Site Administration under Customization, click Modify site content, and then at the top of the Modify Site Content page, click Create new content, as shown in the following screenshot. 

On the Business applications Create Page, under Custom Lists, click Custom List, and on the New List page, type the name of the list as it will appear everywhere on your site to all employees. We’ll give this one a name of “Houses Sold” and type “Houses and associated salespeople and customers” in the Description field. It’s asking if this list is to be displayed on the Quick Launch bar and we’ll click No, but you can include it there if you want. Then click Create, as in the following screenshot.

Now we’re on the Houses page, where we can customize the list. Notice our new description appears near the top. The list also starts out with no columns and no data, which we’ll take care of next. There is a paper clip icon next to “Title.” This means there can be an attachment associated with each item in this list. Since this is a list of houses, what a great place to attach a jpeg image of each house! That would really help associate what each house looks like with its written address. (Remember we said earlier it would help save some memorizing.)

To the left of the list under Actions, click Modify settings and columns. Under Columns, click Add a new column, at the top of the Add Column page, type “Salesperson” in the Column name box, and then under the box select Lookup (information already on this site). This refreshes the page and populates the lists in the drop-downs we’ll see next that determine where the data in the column comes from.

Under Optional Settings for this Column, choose Employees in the “Get information from” drop-down list, and then select Last Name in the In this column drop-down (which means each Salesperson’s last name will appear in the column, sorted by alphabetical order). You can leave “Require that this column contains information” as No. Then click OK, as shown in the following screenshot.

Now let’s repeat this process to create a Customer column that will show the associated customer for each house in our custom list. On the Customize page under Columns, click Add a new column again, type “Customer” in the box, select Lookup (information already on this site) again, and this time in the Get information from list, select Customers. In the In this column field, select Last Name (like the Employees column), leave the other settings at their defaults, and then click OK.

Back on the Customize page, we have one more bit of housekeeping. Under Columns, click Title, type “House” in the Column name box, leave the other settings as they are, and then click OK. At the top of the page, click Go Back to “Houses Sold” to the right of the left-pointing green arrow. (If you wanted to add another column, use this same process. For example, instead of a Customer column, maybe you want two columns, Seller and Buyer.)

Now let’s populate our list. Click New Item, type a residence address or description, select the associated Employee and Customer from the drop-down lists to populate the Salesperson and Customer columns respectively, and then click Save and Close. Repeat with each house you want to include. When you’re done, click Dashboard in the left nav. (Note that to create this list, your Customers and Employees lists have to be up to date. If they’re not, you can easily edit them.)

Let’s make sure everyone can see our new list, and then we’re done. Making sure you’re on the Company View screen in Dashboard (this will add the list to everyone’s Dashboard, not just yours), click Customize this page at the top just under the view tabs. In the Add Web Parts pane on the right, select Site Directory Gallery at the top, and then look for your new list in the Web Part List. You may have to advance the list several times by clicking Next because there are lots of lists and only so much space in the pane. When you see “Houses Sold” (or whatever you called your list), click to select it, choose which zone in the Dashboard to add it to in the Add to drop-down at the bottom left of the Add Web Parts pane (Zone 2 is good), and then click Add, as in the following screenshot.

That’s it. You can use a similar process to the one you used today if you want to make another application that solves a business need. First look through the applications (Web Parts) that come with Office Live to see if there’s one that will help you. Looking through the list also helps to give you an idea of what’s possible. And don’t be afraid to experiment.

- Tara, Lead Program Manager