Microsoft Office Live Small Business Community

How can I share / use Contacts information across the various Office Live Small Business applications? 

I'm having a look at Office Live SB to see if it can be used by our non-profit organisation to maintain a Contacts information database that can be used for example for inviting people to events, mailing out newsletters, tracking activities, managing donors.   I see that Office Live provides a subscription for an advance email tool that caters for the mailing out of newsletters.  But I don't think this option provides the richer Contacts information integration that I would hope to see across the whole site.  E.g. I downloaded and installed an Event Manager business application module, but cannot get it to use/look up the existing Contacts information.

Unfortunately, using Contacts information across teh different Office Live Small Business applicaionts is not possible without custom development.Each application is in a silo and cannot "talk" to other applications.

Royster

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Hi Royster

How do-able is custom development for Office Live, for someone non-technical?  E.g. could I possibly do it myself if I find the necessary documentation?  Or is it really something for someone with say .Net development skills?

As an alternative I'm looking at Joomla and CiviCRM, which provides some good open source functionality, but would require hosting or an inhouse server.  I still prefer the 'software as a service' proposition of Office Live, and its simple look & feel.

Cheers, Ron

Hi Ron,

Have a look through the Office Live Developers Guide - that should get you started. Someone with .NET background will be able to pick up this very easily. The bbuilding blocks for doing custom development for Office Live are javascript and the Sharepoint web services (SOAP):

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/aa751764.aspx 

Joomla or Drupal are good choices for open-source CMS systems.  The capability that you can get with those is on a different league with Office Live - so if you are looking for something more sophisticated and more customizable, Office Live is really not the solution to use.  For instance, something as simple as a registration/membership system is not available with OLSB.

Royster 

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