SharePoint 2010 SocialFest Competition
A week ago the Emerging Business Team at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus hosted a SharePoint 2010 competition titled “SharePoint 2010 SocialFest” where seven startup companies were given one week to develop an application on SharePoint 2010. During the week long event activities such as talks from developers, SharePoint engineering and product management teams, and venture investors were done. By Friday, the contestants presented their applications to a panel of judges which included Charles Schwab & Co. and McKesson. The winner of the competition was Huddle, which was basically synching up external team sites.
The rest of the application developed are the following:
1. Calinda MindUP – presents email interactions into visual maps which help create conversations between groups enhancing collaboration.
2. Confer – is simply twitter on SharePoint 2010 for both internal and external employees.
3. Cortex Intelligence – is an intelligent RSS tools which is presented via webparts fpr discussion, sharing, etc.
4. Leverage Software – makes your email thread into on-deman social workspace for sharing with others.
I work in an off-shore location which means my environment is an outsourced environment and projects and clients I am working on are mostly based in the United States, Europe or Australia. For the past 5 years I mostly haven’t seen the people I am working, talking to for hours during day to day synch-up meeting and calls. While some of the project managers have gone to visit us here in the Philippines, majority of the people are faceless. The common phrase we blurt out on rare occasions we meet the people we are working with is, “putting a face to the name”. What’s fascinating is that after we have put a face to the name, the working relationships seems to improve and some issues and concerns don’t get escalated easily.



