In an earlier post I put up some information about the new Office Snap-ins and now I've gone ahead and installed the tool, so details and snapshots follow.

1. After downloading the tool and running the install you'll see this:

and then 2.

3. Click "I accept"

4. Ok, this might be a problem. If you have a pre-release version of Visual Studio 2005 installed on your machine this is an issue, and if you click "Install" you'll get an error as shown below.
If you do not have a pre-release version of Visual Studio 2005 installed you can skip steps 5 and 6 and jump to Step 7.

5 .Oops! We have a compatibility problem, the only way around it is to either download and run the Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime stand alone install from here
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=de37bfe4-7a5a-4767-bbe1-267418e0f1e7&DisplayLang=en

If you run this file it will give you a list of the incompatible components you can then install 1-by-1, or you can completely remove VS 2005 and replace it with the release version: There is a tool to automate this process as shown below, download and run the tool to remove the pre-release VS 2005.

6. Then install the release version of Visual Studio and restart the Snap-in tool install.

7. Enter the URL of your CRM server



8 Click next.

9. Great, everything checks out! Click Next



10. Click Install

11. Click "Finish"

And that's it, the tool is installed. Great, what do we do now?! :)

Open up Microsoft Word and you should see the Snap-in toolbar as shown below.

If you click the toolbar button without saving the document you will be asked to save the document.

After saving click the "Insert from CRM button" and the snap-in panel will appear.

The next screens show an insertion of some CRM data into the word document.


The screen below shows what happens when I selected "Account" from the drop-down and clicked the green arrow next to teh "Look For" text bos. Very cool, it went to CRM and pulled in our accounts!

I chose "A bike store", selected the "Account Name" row and then clicked "insert"

Next I checked the "Select All" box and clicked insert

For the next test I clicked the "attach to CRM" button on the toolbar, selected "Attach as: Note", and clicked "Attach"

I next opened up MSCRM, opened the "A bike Store" account, and there is my document attachment! Cool!

There is more to come and I suggest you grab this tool and start using it in your demos right away!