Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog

a) Are there real customer scenarios or demands for what we may end up building?  If so, what are they?  I would prefer to look at the lowest hanging fruits, first, obviously.

a. I have had requests around this area from a number of clients directly but for this I will limit to 2 in particular as they are fairly representative.

i. Company X – Company X as a business handles the large (something or other) management. They have limited SPS 2003 deployed with plans to upgrade to 2007. They are considering possible eCal but looking to build the business case for it. Recently they had representatives flown in from around the globe to discuss their use of Social Networking tools for business enablement and had me present the opening session. With their business being so focused on metrics and visualization they had interest in the following areas. Ability to create SharePoint dashboards of mixed visualized data to include gages and charts, RSS consumption and display ad mashing of business data to physical maps for executive and line of business views. In this last case this is a perfect example of a Popfly mashup and during my demonstration of Popfly during the Social networking presentation this was specifically called out by Company X representatives of something they would want to have integrated in to their dashboard and be able to have IOT host, expose data and then have business power users be able to create and serve up. They also specifically asked whether they could tap data being served up from the Microsoft BDC (Business Data Catalog) as they had seen this in action earlier. They also asked about the viability of mashing it up against data in Excel or excel services.

ii. Company Y – Several months ago I was engaged by the XYZ group at Company Y. The purpose was to introduce web 2.0 like technologies in to their business to facilitate communication and data exposure in a manner more in keeping with expectations around web 2.0/social networking on the public Internet. They reported that they were actively losing younger staff who demanded such tools for usage as their means of communication. A 2 day architectural design session ensued and a Knowledge Center rollout plan was established to deliver discussion boards, Wikis for FAQ’s and Tips & Tricks, Blogs, and podcasting. Integrated in to this was News Gator server that handles the pulling in and dissemination of RSS. One of the stated desires was to be able to have business users easily create aggregated RSS feed views as web parts on their SharePoint sites. I demoed the ability to create these conceptually using Silverlight but used Popfly as the creation vehicle. They stated at the time this was exactly what they wanted to be able to do. I further demonstrated the mapping mashup to data and this was cited as an area of greater interest in order to be able to provide dynamic business data against maps by business. The BDC and Excel services were also mentioned in this instance. Company Y further inquired about integration to InfoPath captured data to be mashed up against maps, etc.

b. There are a number of similar business demands but I think in these two cases you can see a position where Popfly would be an ideal technical fit were it available as a hosted internal application. In both instances cited above, and in others, a key component would be the ability to handle integrated security in the long-term though not necessarily in the short term as initial interest would be around data broadly available within the organization.