Silverlight and Popfly in a SharePoint-based collaborative intranet solution?

alexander_windel — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 14:34:00 GMT

Does integrating Silverlight or Popfly into a SharePoint solution add any value?

This is the kind of question I have been asked a couple of times recently.... And actually this question has 2 answers.

Popfly is a Silverlight-based web mashup platform and is targeted at Internet web sites -only-. This implies it's NOT really a suitable option for typical intranet deployments. In the case of SharePoint, you can instead use "Web Part Connections" in your intranet sites and effectively get similar functionality.
Silverlight (1.0 or 1.1) is a runtime environment for Rich Internet Applications. v1.1 will add support for applications written in any .NET language which should give it a significant edge over competing products. The Mono guys also work on a Linux version of Silverlight - aka "Moonlight". Well, would you want to use anything like this in an intranet? In a couple of scenarios the answer can actually be "Yes". I can think of 2 use cases...

a) In certain industries: multimedia applications running on some of your intranet web sites

b) More of a "killer app": building a simplified, user-friendly and highly intuitive GUI for the 5-10% (= not for a simple team site but rather for sth like a product accessories explorer app) of your most complex intranet applications which would otherwise prove difficult to navigate. Enhanced intranet usability can save a company real money (think improved productivity).

Fortunately we will release a Silverlight dev kit for SharePoint v3 some time soon, have a close look at
http://blogs.msdn.com/rbarker/archive/2007/11/02/been-slow-to-update-lately-my-apologies.aspx
for more details.....

Alexander Windel's Blog : popfly