*This is a guest blog, written by SeeUnity CTO, Dan Hunsinger.

Capitalize on that Office365 Investment

We’ve recently completed a couple of interesting projects that can be used to take advantage of your Office365 investment even more. Both of them were relatively straightforward extensions to our Fusion and Echo products that are pretty easy to deploy and configure.

Co-Author a Document with Office Web Apps

We’ve added a new context menu within Fusion that a user invokes to kick off a process that allows a document stored in a Document Management System to be simultaneously edited by any number of users. The functionality can be invoked from wherever the Fusion user interface is deployed, including as a SharePoint web part.

Adding a new context menu to Fusion is a pretty easy process – you basically just edit a menu control file and then add a new JavaScript function that implements it. When the context menu is invoked, the new menu method creates a temporary Echo rule that will copy the document from its source to a configurable location in SharePoint, check in/out in DMS, return information the browser code about how/where to open the SharePoint document (Office Web Apps), and then monitor it until the editing is complete. If the document has been changed a new version is saved back to DMS, and then the document is unlocked and removed from SharePoint. Fusion provides the user interface and Echo controls the synchronization process.

The user experience is about as simple as it gets. A user finds a document they want to edit, selects “Edit”, and then they can see a browser tab with the document opened in the appropriate Office Web App. They can invite other users to edit, make changes, view other changes, and do all the things Office Web Apps were built to do. When they’re done, they just close the editor and SeeUnity will save any changes as required.

If you’ve already got Office365 deployment is easy. Just install and configure Echo with endpoints to the source and target systems, deploy Fusion to wherever you want it to run, and that’s it. Edit away.

Synchronize Recently Edited Docs to OneDrive

We’ve had a Microsoft OneDrive connector along with Echo support for it for quite a while now. We’ve recently added a new capability where a user can “opt-in” to a background process that will synchronize some entity in a DMS system to OneDrive. For this particular project, the user’s recently edited documents are automatically kept in sync with OneDrive, but in reality, other items\lists can be synced as well.

An opt-in web page was added to Fusion where a user can enter credentials if applicable and verify they want to participate. For OneDrive, an OAuth flow is used to log on to OneDrive (multi-factor authentication, etc.) and then grant Echo access. When a user opts in, an Echo rule is created that will synchronize their recently edited list to a “recently-edited” folder in their personal OneDrive. Echo will then keep their recently edited list in sync with OneDrive at whatever frequency you’d like. This sync feature was already in Echo, so the technical change here was to create the opt-in UI/process.

The experience is very simple. Users will be emailed a link to the opt-in page and their recently edited list will appear in OneDrive. If there’s any kind of authentication problem during processing, they will be emailed a link to the opt-in page along with a message saying they need to re-authenticate (for example, if their DMS password expires).