By Alex, a Senior .NET Developer on Murano Software’s team
Murano Software is becoming a permanent participant in the Microsoft Incubation Week events. Last week (Jan 25-29), our company participated as a development partner in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Social Fest at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus. We provided seven top Microsoft BizSpark startups with outsource development support, SharePoint expertise and advice. Just as it was during other Microsoft Incubation Weeks, the mission of our team, led by Dimitri Nikouline, this year was to create working solutions for our clients in the shortest terms of the event. Our developers and startup representatives were working day and night, in a warm and competitive atmosphere, being eager to try the new features and implement their ideas. .
This was even more challenging, since the products - Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 - are Betas now, and there was no strong knowledge base, except samples in Microsoft blogs and related Internet resources. But our company, always being on the cutting edge of the development technologies, successfully defeated all of these challenges. In addition to the true interest in the newest technologies and software development passion, we got through these challenges because of intensive communication and team spirit. Working with the different startup clients, we established a single workspace for all involved to resolve issues faster and exchange tips, ideas, and links.
Although these startups work in different areas of business intelligence and communications, they all are looking forward to the integration with SharePoint as an opportunity to upgrade their working and beneficial products to the enterprise-level applications. This wide range of interests resulted in a large variety of integration tasks successfully resolved by our guys during that week, from the UI widgets customization to search, synchronization and user profile management.
Huddle
The winning project, Huddle, is helping businesses across the world to work online in a common workspace, share and edit the documents, involving the external users in their workflows. Our guys did a great job using Silverlight and SharePoint 2010 features, customizing the UI and the back-end logic by means of timer jobs.
Calinda Software
Calinda Software, the second winner with their MindUp product, are focused on making e-mail communications structured and easy, so no attachment gets lost, and the history of sent and received messages can be seen on a visual map. With SharePoint 2010, the e-mail environment transparently becomes integrated with document libraries and lists in MOSS. Our commitment to their success was a service, allowing users to search for people with specific skills and give the relevancy estimates for these search results.
GetConfer
Confer is a company that offers a microblogging Web application to simplify communications between employees of a big company. In order to extend its functionality on the enterprise SharePoint installation, we worked together on mechanisms to map Confer's users to SharePoint users.
Cortex Intelligence
Cortex Intelligence provides a market intelligence service for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 users, letting them access external data, such as market data, news and so on. During the event, our guys worked on integrating the microblog functionality of SharePoint with external data providers, allowing them to post blog articles and put links to external articles into the user's microblog.
Leverage Software
LeverageSoftware's DesignSpace platform transforms sets of e-mail threads into a social workspace that the users can share with other colleagues in their company. We helped them to integrate with the people search functionality of SharePoint 2010.
Liaise
Liaise allows SharePoint 2010 users to transparently update their SharePoint items (tasks, lists and so on) with the information parsed from the e-mail messages they send, save attachments in document libraries and so on. We made a prototype solution, putting task summary information in the calendar, automatically updating any change to the task list.
Loqu8
Loqu8 Prelude is a tool that’s integrated into Microsoft applications (Office, Media Player, Control Panel, etc.), showing users contextually relevant information when they are hovering a word. During Microsoft Incubation Week, we worked on the integration of their tool with SharePoint’s platform.