Officeatwork Data Integration with SharePoint

Officeatwork is an easy way to manage, discover and use your templates in Office, which can be integrated and synchronized codeless with SharePoint on-premise using the Layer2 Business Data List Connector.

In case you are looking for Online data integration, you will find the right tool here.

This Add-in marks the first globally available template distribution solution designed for Office 365. It targets cloud ready organizations wanting to empower their information workers to achieve more.Organizations sending templates to users via e-mail or posting them on a local intranet have often experienced limited success in getting the new templates adopted. With the Template Chooser Add-in for Office 365 your company templates are stored in SharePoint online, within your Office 365 tenant and are managed with SharePoint’s rich document management and security functions like versioning or sharing. The templates light up right within the Office applications, instantly and globally. This way your templates get adopted by your users on all platforms and devices.

Benefits of Officeatwork Data Integration in SharePoint

• Very easy to setup in a few minutes: Create a SharePoint list, click "Connect to external data source" in the list settings, select the data provider, enter connection settings and data query as shown below. That's it.
• One-way and optional two-way connection: You can write-back the changes made in SharePoint to the external Notes or Domino data source automatically with full CRUD (Create / Update / Delete) functionality. The SharePoint list can act as a full-featured front-end for external systems.
• Well-known BCS "external list" issues and limitations are completely solved: ALL list features are to you. Views, sorting and grouping, filters, calculated fields, search, managed metadata. Lookups, additional columns and attachments can be created as normal. All kind of lists can be used, e.g. contacts, tasks, calendar, or custom lists. You can take external data offline via Outlook.

• Workflows and notifications on external data change: List workflows and change notifications per RSS or email can be used to take business actions in SharePoint, when external Notes or Domino data records are changed.
• Application logging, reporting, and notifications: A SharePoint list is used to store settings and log information. SharePoint item versioning and workflows can be used to manage reporting and notifications. Direct notification per email in case of errors is supported as well.
• Highest Security, best performance, easy to maintain: SharePoint Secure Store can be used to store security relevant configuration information safely in one central place. Users are working with the SharePoint lists as an external data cache with highest security and performance.
• 100+ external systems supported: Layer2 Data Providers included (e.g. for SharePoint/Office 365, Exchange, Dynamics, OData, XML/RSS, SOAP), vendor specific data providers can be used (e.g. SQL Server Oracle, mySQL etc.), 3rd party data providers also supported, e.g. for ERP/CRMs, Facebook or Twitter. See here for supported systems and applications.

Officeatwork Specific SharePoint Configuration Settings

In the Layer2 Business Data List Connector the data source must be configured as follows to connect:

​Please note the following specific settings:

• Select the Layer2 Data Provider for SharePoint (CSOM)  that‘s is a part of the Layer2 Business Data List Connector.
• You can use a connection string like this to connect:
  Url=https://yourcompany.sharepoint.com/sites/officeatwork/TemplateChooser;List=Templates;Authentication=Office365;User=user@yourcompany.com;

• You can map your data fields to specific external source fields in the Layer2 Business Data List Connector. Please take care about data types (simple type conversions are supported).
• Please enter an appropriate primary key (column with unique values), depending on query (see data preview for this).

• No installation or changes are required at the ODBC data source or data destination.
  

Officeatwork SharePoint Connection Details

Provider:
Layer2 Data Provider for SharePoint (CSOM)

Connection string sample:
Url=https://layer2.sharepoint.com/sites/officeatwork/TemplateChooser;List=Templates;Authentication=Office365;User=sschneider@layer2.de;

Officeatwork SharePoint Known Issues & Workarounds

The integration of Officeatwork data with SharePoint has the following known issues and workarounds:

You can generally use the connection for uni-directional synchronization (read access). We cannot support writing back to this entity as most of the tables are read-only and only available through views.

Ready for next steps?