Easier prepare for a meeting with the Mavention Meeting Outlook Add-in
Preparing for a meeting and looking for relevant information? What if Outlook would deliver everything you need to know right at your finger tips?
Preparing for meetings
We all attend meetings and while some of us do it more often than others, we all struggle with finding the relevant information to prepare for those meetings. We use different systems that help us do our work but as a result relevant information is becoming more and more sparse and spread across the different silos. What if we could leverage the Office Graph to find everything we need to know to prepare for a meeting?
Mavention Meeting Outlook Add-in
At the recent Microsoft Ignite conference, as a part of the MVP Office Graph battle, I demonstrated the Mavention Meeting Outlook Add-in that helps you prepare for meetings.
Easier prepare for a meeting with the Mavention Meeting Outlook Add-in
Using the information from the meeting such as subject, attendees and meeting date and time the add-in queries the Office Graph for relevant documents. But the Meeting add-in shows relevant information beyond what’s stored in the Office Graph today.
Using information from CRM Online it’s also capable of showing information about external attendees, current opportunities or issues.
If the meeting involves external attendees and their organization record contains a link to their website the Outlook Add-in is also capable of showing news.
The Mavention Meeting Outlook Add-in is a one-stop-shop for preparing for meetings and provides you a complete overview: from the current meeting to the whole organization of what might be relevant to the appointment.
Anatomy of the Mavention Meeting Outlook Add-in
The Mavention Meeting Outlook Add-in is an Outlook Add-in backed by a Node.js app to communicate with the Office 365 APIs. The UI of the app has been built as an AngularJS SPA with the front-end styled using Bootstrap. The app has been built using Visual Studio Code on OS X – all of which prove the new direction that Microsoft has taken allowing all developers to integrate with Office 365 using their existing skillset and platforms.
The next steps
The Mavention Meeting Outlook Add-in is a solid v0.1 and there are a few things that we have to finalize to make it a v1.0 that we could publish in the Office Store.
One of the things that we are wondering about is whether the add-in should remain the way it is or whether we should split it into separate add-ins each with its own responsibility allowing you for more flexibility and choice which functionalities you want to use.
Another thing that we haven’t decided on yet is the source from which to retrieve the list of customers and projects that we use to determine the relevance of documents and retrieve additional information from. In its current form the add-in uses CRM Online for that, but if you’re not using CRM Online theoretically you would need some another source of data to get as relevant results as you do now.
We really enjoyed thinking about the add-in, designing it and building it on the Office platform using its latest capabilities. We are also looking forward to the release of the new Office Graph API with its new capabilities.
We would love to hear your feedback with regard to what would make it useful for you and your organization and what would make sense with regard to retrieving information outside of the Office Graph.