We’ve been getting more social at Lightning Tools with our forum web parts. Quite often people who are looking at using Social Squared will ask if it has a micro-blogging component. To date the answer has been no, but we’ve been working on a project in our spare time that may well change that.
We’ve been a fan of microblogging for a while. From the fun of Twitter to the usefulness amongst distributed colleagues of internal microblogging tools. The ones we’ve used though see to have had SharePoint integration almost as an after thought. So we’ve decided to built our own microblogging solution called Lightning Streams – this is our code name for the product although often they stick for us!
This is also a new approach for a product for us. Rather than storing the data locally within SharePoint or a local instance of MS SQL Server, we’re looking at storing it as a service and possibly using Azure. This brings us 3 benefits:
1, We can deploy as a Sandboxed Solution in SharePoint 2010 so it can also be used in hosted environments.
2, We can host a web site where you can invite external parties to use the stream as well eg customers
3, You can easily use the stream on a device such as iPhone or Windows Phone 7
If you’d like to help us beta test any of this please leave a comment.
So is microblogging something your company is interested in? How do you see microblogging fitting in with SharePoint 2010 in terms of being a useful business tool?
