SharePoint in-a-box™ Business Solutions!

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One of the most lacking feature in SharePoint 2007 is the ability to create relations between lists and items in lists. We have thought long and hard about how to implement this functionality in SharePoint while leaving as small a footprint as possible.

Our first implementation of this functionality was bundled in a product called Sopra and was aimed towards CRM. The product was basically a few webparts, a relationship API and some backend lists to keep the relationship information. With this approach we were able to add our relationship webpart to the editForm.aspx pages of lists and configure it to be able to add items / documents in relationship with the current item.

This approach however came with huge drawbacks for both our development team and the clients. So we decided to review our implementation and came up with the next generation of relationship management – xRM – Anything Relationship Management. Some of you might have heard that buzz word before and that’s because it’s from Microsoft (http://www.xrm.com/).

The basic idea is to not be limited in the relationships we can setup in your business. The relationship management module of our new Alexya™ platform for SharePoint leverages the concept of anything relationship management, but inside SharePoint. Think about it, in SharePoint you can create much more than items and documents in lists. You can create wikis, blogs, documents, lists of data, lists of images, lists of contacts, team sites etc… Why would you limit the relationships to only 1 or 2 of those?

Our new generation xRM is so tightly integrated into SharePoint that the implementation is literally a zero footprint integration. No more webparts to manage and absolutely no loss of out of the box functionalities in the relationship views; now, you actually get added functionalities like the checkbox. The xRM module relationship area is 100% Ajax and all the work you do while using it will never trigger a page refresh, this is a major enhancement for users. Also, the original list forms are preserved and never changed.

The way relationships are created between objects in SharePoint is now centralized in a Silverlight administration interface completely integrated into SharePoint, no external database, no separate server.

If you wish to see it in action you can go on YouTube watch one of our videos: http://www.alcero.com/sharepoint/alexya/demos.htm