If you're reading this blog, I'm going to assume that you're familiar with (or have at least heard of) Twitter, the microblogging product which has grown into a genuine phenomenon over the past couple of years. What you may not be familiar with, however, is Yammer, a similar product which has positioned itself as providing microblogging for the enterprise.
I wasn't aware of Yammer until my wife recently mentioned that they use it at the mid-size company where she works as a Product Manager (and where SharePoint Admin is one of the hats she wears). Since Yammer follows the Twitter model and is cloud-based, however, the IT group at her company have expressed some security concerns, and would strongly prefer to adopt (or develop) a similar tool which could be securely deployed behind the firewall. Ideally, such a product would also integrate seamlessly with SharePoint.
Following exhaustive research and competitive analysis, my wife discovered a variety of options on the market, representing a wide range of cost and functionality, but only one which offered integration with SharePoint: Newsgator Social Sites. As the product name name implies, Newsgator Social Sites offers microblogging and much, much more. Alas, despite the evident quality and robustness of the product, it was ultimately decided to be cost-prohibitive to implement within the organization.
Having also looked into potentially accomplishing something similar to microblogging in SharePoint out-of-the-box, and deciding that it was sort of possible through a combination of lists and alerts (but not close enough to possible to be a viable option), my wife ultimately suggested to me, "Bamboo needs to develop a microblogging Web Part for SharePoint."
Earlier today, I posed the question to Muhammad, one of our senior engineers here at Bamboo, laying out the scenario and asking if the desired functionality was something we could conceivably develop as a Web Part. Happily, Muhammad's response at first blush was, "yes, technically this is very straightforward ... we'd let SharePoint handle the data and the security, and just wrap it in a nice UI."
It's been a while since I've treated this blog as a test balloon, so I hope you'll forgive the interruption of "regular" programming, but I have to ask: Would anybody (other than my wife) out there be interested in purchasing a microblogging Web Part if Bamboo were to develop one? Feel free to respond either in the comments, or in private email to me at john.anderson@bamboosolutions.com. Thanks!
Posted
Aug 31 2009, 04:47 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.