Integrating Your Line of Business System with MacroView DMF

You are storing the documents for your clients and projects in SharePoint – for each client / project there is a corresponding document library, folder or document set. You are looking at the record for a client / project in a line of business system and you want to be able to click on a hyperlink and jump straight into that library, folder or document set so that you can access the documents and emails that have been stored for that client /project. Not a problem if you are OK to work with those documents and emails in the native SharePoint web browser UI. But what if you prefer to work with documents and emails using MacroView DMF, which provides a much richer set of options for document and email management?

By ‘richer set of options’ I mean the ability to see where the document library / document set / folder is located in the overall SharePoint tree, to preview documents and to have a right-click menu that provides options to Rename, Move, Copy, View Audit Log entries, Compare, Print etc – in addition to the options that you get in the OOB SharePoint web browser UI. Richer also means being able to drag and drop one or multiple emails or documents to save them to the Client / Project area in SharePoint.

The good news is that MacroView DMF lets you create a hyperlink to a library, folder or document set so that when you click the link you find yourself in MacroView DMF Explorer, already navigated to the Client / Project area. You can also create a hyperlink to a document so that when you click the link the document is opened from SharePoint and already checked out, ready for editing.

These ‘super-links’ are implemented by the MacroView DMF Protocol Handler. Sounds technical, but it is really simple – just a regular hyperlink prefixed with dmf:

For example if the URL for the document library that corresponds to a Project is :

http://servername/sites/clientname/project101

then the super-link is simply:

dmf: http://servername/sites/clientname/project101

You can record the super-link in the record for the project in your Project management system or CRM system. You open the record, click the super-link and next thing you are in MacroView DMF Explorer looking at the documents for that project. If Outlook is running (e.g. on a separate display monitor) then you can save emails to the Project simply by selecting them in Outlook and dragging and dropping them to MacroView DMF Explorer.

BTW, if MacroView DMF Explorer is already opened it will get focus – multiple copies of MacroView DMF Explorer do not get opened by the protocol handler.

See also Creating a new CRM Record as You Profile a Document.