After 4 days of WorldWide Partner Conference, things were starting to wind down… except we still had the Office Live ‘break out session” to go on Thursday afternoon, not the easiest time to draw a crowd. So many people were ready to get out of dodge, er, Boston, that they brought their luggage to the conference to go directly to the airport afterwards. Given troubles with the tunnel to Logan Airport, that probably wasn’t a bad idea.
Anyway, the Office Live team assembled for one last booth shift on the conference floor, talked to many more partners and then put a sign up indicating where our break out session was. And then we bid adieu to the Office Live booth. Hurray!
Marja Koopmans, our director of channel development, introduced the break out session by framing the discussion that Office Live is targeting the Small Business segment, 1-10 employees. From a business perspective, this is an underserved and strategic market for Solution Developers. Until now, developers haven’t had many vehicles to get into small businesses, since they are frequently priced out. Office Live is pretty affordable, and by getting in with small businesses that are growing fast, developers are seeding their own future growth. Marja also touched on the other recent news for Solution Developers: Learn about WSS v3 now to be ready to develop on the next Office Live release and check out the Developer Center on MSDN.
We were again joined by our Pilot partners Shiraz from QDabra and Carl Dinerware, who presented working code solutions running on the vNext of Office Live! Shiraz walked through QDabra’s basic project management application that integrates seamlessly with Office Live’s existing customer & project management apps. It’s designed for people who are running small consulting firms and uses Infopath forms to generate statements of work, billing and much more. Overall a pretty incredible solution with minimal effort by QDabra to integrate it into Office Live.
Carl demonstrated the Dinerware integration into an Office Live dashboard. Using SharePoint Designer (vNext of FrontPage), Dinerware was able to create a data view web part that grabbed data from a web service on a Dinerware in-restaurant “brain” (aka Server) and display that data right in Office Live. So instead of the island of data living in a restaurant, Dinerware customers can grab their data from anywhere.
Both demos went off without a hitch, and, given the lateness of this session in the conference schedule, we actually had a pretty health attendance.