Learning Center - Ribbon Designer for Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365

SharePoint and Office 365 - Articles

  • SharePoint Ribbon UI customization with Add-in Express Ribbon Designer
    This article will show you how you can customize the SharePoint Ribbon in less than 5 minutes. Of course, if you are using Ribbon Designer for SharePoint and Office 365 :)
  • Complete Guide: Getting Started
    End-to-end samples from the Developer's Guide will show you how to quickly extend the Ribbon UI of SharePoint and Office 365 solutions without learning Ribbon XML.
  • What is Office 365 for your end-users?
    Like many Office developers you must be wondering what Office 365 is and how it could benefit your customers. It isn't easy to give the answer in one sentence, but if you have to: it is a reliable and secure communication, collaboration and productivity solution hosted by Microsoft in the cloud. Read the article for full details.
  • Office 365 from a developer point of view
    In this article Pieter van der Westhuizen is looking at the different components of Office 365 and what they mean to the developer.
  • Setting up your PC for SharePoint development
    It is no secret that Office 365 will help move Office to the cloud and as developers we need to gear up for it. The major part of Office 365 is SharePoint and this article will walk you through the process of preparing your PC's development environment.
  • Customizing the SharePoint Ribbon
    If you've used SharePoint, the first thing you would've noticed is the Ribbon UI. The SharePoint ribbon provides users with a familiar Office user interface and it is also extensible for developers. This means developers can add their own tabs, groups and controls to the ribbon. The article explains how to do it.
  • Office 365 - Lync Online: to customize, or not to customiz
    Like the main character Hamlet in the Shakespeare play wondered whether to continue to exist or not, developers sometimes have to wonder whether to integrate with or customize certain applications or leave the standard functionality be. Pieter van der Westhuizen considers this question in relation to Lync Online.
  • Office 365 - Exchange Online Extensibility. What is it and what can you use it for?
    This article will shed some light on what can be expected by developers from Office 365 Exchange Online offering.
  • Office 365 - SharePoint Online building blocks
    One of the biggest components of Office 365 is SharePoint Online and from a developer's point of view it is also one of the most customizable. In post takes an in-depth look at the building blocks for SharePoint that are available to developers.
  • Office 365 - Exchange Online examples
    In this article Pieter van der Westhuizen takes a hands-on approach and looks at some examples of performing various tasks in Exchange Online using the Exchange Web Services API. C# sample is available for download at the end of the post.
  • Office 365 - Share Outlook contacts with Lync Online contextual conversations
    The article shows how you can integrate Microsoft Lync into your current day-to-day business systems. We will create a simple WPF application and add a feature to start a contextual Lync conversation based on the currently selected client the user has open in their management system.
  • Office 365 - Save Outlook e-mails and attachments to SharePoint Online programmatically
    This post explains how you can write a Microsoft Outlook add-in that will save an e-mail's attachments and/or the entire e-mail to an Office 365 hosted SharePoint Online list.
  • Office 365 - Attach files from SharePoint to Outlook E-mail programmatically
    The post demonstrates how to attach files from SharePoint Online to Outlook e-mail messages. This could be useful if your customer has a shared library with documents they send via e-mail on a regular basis.
  • Moving your existing Access database to Office 365
    From this article you will learn how you can leverage your Office 365 Access services to web-enable your current Access databases.
  • Office 365 - Using jQuery with SharePoint Online
    How to use jQuery when you need to liven up a web page or do some web programming magic? That is what the article shows where Pieter van der Westhuizen writes a fairly simple SharePoint WebPart and adds some jQuery logic to it.

SharePoint and Office 365 - Videos

  • Introduction to Ribbon Designer
    The genius with the Ribbon Designer makes building custom ribbons simple. It allows you to quickly build custom SharePoint Ribbons and attach your functional code to it. You don't need to spend hours learning the Ribbon XML schema. So, if your goal is to build SharePoint solutions and have more and more users work with them every day, then you need to watch this 2 minute overview of our ground-breaking new product.
  • Ribbon Designer for SharePoint and Office 365, end-to-end demo
    This video shows how to use the Ribbon Designer for SharePoint and Office 365 to create your first custom SharePoint ribbon. This is a 20 minute end-to-end demo... which means it doesn't stop until the solution is deployed and working in SharePoint.
  • Developing your first SharePoint Online solution
    This video shows how to build your first Office 365 solution. This solution is a custom SharePoint ribbon that works with SharePoint Online. It's simple but its simplicity is elegant! The video covers the scenario end-to-end, from developing it to deploying.
  • What is Office 365?
    Office 365 is here and businesses are starting to ask: Where to start? At the beginning of course! This video provides a quick and comprehensive overview of Office 365 features and capabilities and answers the questions: What is Office 365? And how does it work?
  • What is Office 365 from a developer's perspective?
    This video provides an overview of Office 365 from the developer's perspective. After watching this video you will have a better understanding of technology involved, what's different and what's the same, if it is just the usual "information worker" aspects of Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Exchange 2010 and a few others or is there more to it?
  • Office 365 customization and setup
    If you are looking to start building solutions with Office 365, then this video is for you. It explains three things: what custom code solution you can build for Office 365 using Visual Studio, how they work and what you need to setup your development environment.
  • Exchange Online Extensibility
    Exchange Online allows you to access its web services via a managed API. What this means is you can build applications that work with Exchange Online data and integrate Exchange business logic. There's more to it as this short video illustrates.
  • Extending Office 365 with SharePoint applications
    There are a couple of tools for building SharePoint solutions that do not require you to write code. This video discusses both of them and does a pretty good job of explaining what's possible.