Imagine this. The full, awesome power of the SalesLogix Mobile client, embedded in Outlook that shows the matching contact from the context of the currently selected e-mail in Outlook. Pretty awesome thought, right? Well, it’s an idea that I have in the works, and not all that far off.
Take a look. Be sure to click on the image to see it full size.
(Click to view full size)
So, what exactly are we looking at here? This is Chromium, the open source browser code behind Google Chrome, embedded in an Outlook addin. It hosts the SalesLogix Mobile client, in all it’s HTML5 goodness, and then attempts to set context based on the currently selected e-mail. It uses SData to locate the matching contact for the selected e-mail address and then uses the matching ContactID value to *attempt* to set that context in the embedded mobile client. I say *attempt* because there are some issues with setting context to a specific record in the mobile client in the current builds.
What’s left to get this to fully work? Well, there’s a lot of things. The addin does a lot of injecting Javascript into the embedded client to get things to work the way I want/need it to. I’d rather not have to do that, since that is prone to possible issues, and get the mobile client to play nicely in this scenario. I have a modified version of the mobile client started that I am using for a lot of this even with the constant javascript injection in the client. It would be great to just have the mobile client work as is with this. Also, there’s some small “quirky” issues with embedding Chromium in Outlook that I need to get worked out. Most of the work that has gone into this so far is getting Chromium to work in an Outlook addin and play nicely embedded in Outlook. Note, this is Chromium, not Google Chrome. You don’t even need Google Chrome installed for this to work. Anyway, all this extra work using Chromium (which isn’t really built to be embeddable in other apps) wouldn’t be necessary if IE got it’s act together with full support for HTML5. In time it might get there which could make this solution get a whole lot closer to working in a quicker time frame.
It goes without saying how highly flexible this would be. You can customize the mobile client and then your customizations would be available in Outlook as well, all in context to the currently selected e-mail.
As I mentioned, there is still a ton of work before this sees the light of day, but for now, I’m excited enough about this that I thought it was worth sharing a sneak peek.
