I had a great conversation today with Michael Gannotti, Senior Technology Specialist for Microsoft, specialising on Sharepoint technologies. I have been reading Michael’s blog and listening to his excellent Michael on the Go podcasts, and following his Academy Mobile videos. So I was really looking forward to speaking with Michael and I’ll be publishing the conversation as a podcast.
We covered a huge amount of topics surrounding Sharepoint, Academy Mobile, intranets, blogs, wikis, social networks, mobile devices to name a few. I also put forward quite a few ideas and potential opportunies for Sharepoint and the .NET platform with Social Networking:
.NET and sharepoint has a great opportunity combined with Silverlight and Popfly community elements to shape the future of the changing face of blogs. Think a lifestream like tumblr.com or soup.io combined with the features of tafiti.com and mashing up your vital feeds, images, bookmarks, videos and essential services etc.
A freely downloadable .NET blog platform, almost like Visual Studio Express in concept, to lower barriers to entry and spread the word of Sharepoint and .NET.
An emphasis on ease of integration to allow widgets from the community, social network sites like flickr and del.icio.us.
More cross browser compatibility. Some MSDN blogs don’t take comments from firefox.
Facebook applications for services like Soap Box.
It really looks like Microsoft is listening to the community and is putting a huge emphasis on integrating community elements. I’m massively looking forward to the development of Academy Mobile.
