New E2E Sales Forecast OBA Released

The E2E Sales Forecast OBA walks you through a salesperson creating and submitting a quarterly sales forecast. Using a customized Excel template (built using VS 2008/VSTO), our salesperson has the ability to navigate to the team Sales Forecast portal (SharePoint portal), invoke a custom Excel sales forecast template from the New button (content type mapping to a custom template), load line-of-business sales data into the document (via WPF custom actions pane), generate executive reports for the forecast (via Open XML), and submit the document for approval (through SharePoint workflow).

The approving manager can interact directly with SharePoint or choose to approve the workflow via a custom Outlook Form Region (built using VS 2008/VSTO). Messaging of the workflow is marshaled by SharePoint, and Open XML enables the solution to parse out the necessary data and attach to workflow and to the custom Outlook from region. Also, we’ve added UC so the actors within the demo can interact with one another.

Featured technologies include:

  • SharePoint
  • Office Client Ribbon and Action Pane Customizations (VS 2008/VSTO)
  • Outlook Custom Form Regions
  • Open XML
  • Unified Communications (UC)
  • SharePoint Workflow
  • Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

For the community source-code download and accompanying Wrox book, you can check out the following resources:

E2E Sales Forecast OBA Resources