Social Software, SharePoint and Microsoft 2.0
I made a deliberate choice in joining Microsoft, in fact a very deliberate choice. I made a bet that we will emerge into a serious online software and services company that not only embraces but leads the next generation of Internet technology. I also made a bet that in the future people want to leverage the business infrastructure (messaging, document management, HR systems etc) they have already invested in as much as they possibly can by building massively connected systems. Scorn, scath, sigh, do what you will but that’s the bet I made when I decided to bring my startup idea to Microsoft. Nine months in I am still feeling confident about that bet; in fact I am more confident than I was when I joined. There is no doubt that we are in the middle of a paradigm shift from where we were yesterday and that there are things about the company that needs to adapt and evolve (read lots of work ahead before we get there) but with projects like Live Mesh and now TownSquare and the vast “Live” cloud computing infrastructure that is being built, the advances in .NET etc., I think Microsoft 2.0 will be a brilliant place in which to do great things. My copy of Mary Jo-Foleys Microsoft 2.0 book hasn’t arrived yet but I hear it’s an interesting read. I think there will be a second coming and I want to be an integral apart of it.
Earlier in the year I started using TownSquare. The minute I saw it I immediately became a fan and realized its huge potential. Townsquare is just being made public so I can now blog a little about why I love it. I am intimately interested in social software and am a big user of LinkedIn (my profile is here I should really update it) and have a FaceBook page. FaceBook intrigued me for a while but these days drives me mad and I am seriously thinking about deleting or retiring my page. It’s designed for a different audience and quite frankly I am fed up with being poked, getting sent tropical fish and invites from people who frankly aren’t friends. It’s the concept and architecture that interests me and for a long time I have wanted a business version. Introducing TownSquare! TownSquare is built on SharePoint and keeps tracks of people in a business environment. I have added my team to it and I get a nice RSS feed of all changes to peoples titles, offices and even when they add new files or change their profile on their MySite.
Townsquare is interesting but it’s SharePoint that’s really important here. SharePoint has been described as Microsofts Sleeper Cell by the Wall Street Journal. Many people confuse it with a document management system but it’s really a collaboration platform on which you can build cool social applications. Take a look at the SharePoint Podcasting Kit (open source) as an example….
My team are just finishing up an internal portal built on SharePoint for our product management. I will post some screen shots of that and how it works when we have released it at the end of the month but the power of the platform makes for great development. SharePoint lists have been used to build a FAQ engine where FAQ’s can be added by anyone and exposed as RSS seamlessly; the same for documents etc. We have workflow for support requests which can then be pushed as work items into Team Foundation Server, wiki pages for each product for field engineers and we will be pulling the latest daily builds from Team Foundation Server for download links, change logs etc.
All Up the technology stack emerging to build the next generation of security management applications on is going to play a massive role on what my group produces and I am excited by the changes I see. Rome wasn’t built in a day, we have lots of things that need changing (including culture) but it is an exciting time ahead!
