With the latest update of DataPoint, we released a new data provider – Microsoft Exchange connectivity. A new data provider to connect your presentation to Microsoft Exchange data is added to the already long list of possible data providers. This is the 25th data provider in DataPoint! Who does better in the data driven presentations world?

Within the Microsoft family, you were able to connect to Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL Server databases, Microsoft Excel worksheets and Microsoft SharePoint lists. Now a fifth data provider of the Microsoft family is available.

With a data connection to Microsoft Exchange, you can now display mail messages, calendar items or appointments, contacts, notes and tasks in real time. Not that you want to browse your mail messages on a large television screen in your office. That will probably not happen. But this gives you the possibility to send mail messages with your smart phone, even while you are on holiday in Thailand, to a given screen in your factory. Imagine that you give each information screen in your company an unique email addresses like screen1@presentationpoint.com (for sales office) and screen2@presentationpoint.com (for production). You can send e.g. a mail message with subject ‘Work harder!’ to screen2@presentationpoint.com and this will be displayed as a message on the screen there. You can’t imagine an easier communication system. With your smartphone on holiday, or on a computer at an internet cafe, you can send messages to your information screens. How nice is that?!

Use DataPoint for real-time data

Our DataPoint add-on for PowerPoint is a tool to display real-time information on your slides. Click the DataPoint option of your PowerPoint ribbon. Then, at the Connections group, click the List button to set up the data sources of your presentation.

From the list of available data providers, select the Microsoft Exchange data provider and click the Add connection button.

Enter your credentials to access a Microsoft Exchange account. First, start with the server. Enter the server name of the computer that is running your Microsoft Exchange.

For hosted Exchange or Office 365, use this url: https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx

Next, enter your username and password. Finally, select the platform of the Exchange server that you are connecting to. Use the Test button to verify your entries and click OK to close.

You already have a connection to your Microsoft Exchange server and you are ready to get real-time information out of it. With the newly inserted Microsoft Exchange connectivity data connection, click the Add query button.

You can choose from a list of available data objects like calendar, contacts, inbox etc. You will recognize these names from the folders and items that you have in your Microsoft Outlook or Exchange. You can easily choose the Inbox folder or even use a custom SQL statement to get other or filtered information from a given data table.

Next to this, you can set the refresh rate. Choose a higher refresh rate when you are displaying critical information. And a lower rate for less critical information.

Your information is now ready and you can see a preview of your data.

Linking Microsoft Exchange Connectivity data on your slides

You can add more data providers and data to this presentation. You can also get some RSS news and weather information. Start adding slides and shapes to this presentation. For example a text box and link the content of that text box to a given data table and choose what column to display.

Run your slide show and DataPoint will check for data updates, and update your slide content whenever there is new information available.