I'm Dave Chennault, and this is my first guest blog for Bamboo Nation. I will be blogging about Governance for SharePoint, cool new trends in technology that affect SharePoint, and interesting aspects to BPOS and SharePoint in the cloud. I've also got a new book on SharePoint Governance that has been published and you can read excerpts on TechNet by following this link. You can buy a copy on Amazon by following this link. Finally, I am a MCTS in SharePoint and Business Process Automation and a CISA (Certified Information Systems Auditor) and I have my own company focused on building SharePoint Apps that will run in BPOS or on-premises…whew! Now on to the good stuff.
We recently completed deploying a Salesforce.com replacement for a company with 700 sales reps using SharePoint 2010. The SharePoint Application is designed to run in BPOS (the cloud) so we use a lot of Sandbox solutions, SharePoint workflow, and JavaScript. The application will be available for general use when BPOS SharePoint 2010 is available. In the meantime, we run it in-house.
The application is working great and it is saving the company a lot of money every month since they no longer need to pay for a Salesforce subscription for each of their 700 salespeople – you do the math on that one and you'll see it will save them over $1 million in 18 months. The system has more functionality than Salesforce since it is built using SharePoint 2010. We built it in a little over three months – we were on the beta for SharePoint and the system is now in production.
A lot of the sales guys are starting to get iPads, and I don't blame them. The iPad is a great tool for mobile workers and the user interface is spectacular. We wondered how our SharePoint 2010 application would run if we tried to access it from an iPad running Safari mobile, so we went to an Apple store and tried logging in. To be honest, we did not think it would work.
Guess what… it works perfectly. All the dropdowns work, all functionality works. It is a thing of wonder to behold. The SharePoint team did a great job and we were careful not to invoke any Flash or exotic screen designs. We stuck with simple screens and a clean interface and everything worked great.
Now the really exciting news: we tried enabling Office Web Apps in a doc library to see what would happen. Guess what… you can view Word, PowerPoint and Excel files on the iPad if you use SharePoint and the Office Web Apps. You can even edit Excel on the iPad, although you can't edit Word or PowerPoint on the iPad.
I think this is big news. Ladies and gentlemen – may I introduce the next killer iPad application – SharePoint 2010.
You can contact me at DaveC@SkyliteSystems.com if you have any questions. 'Til next time.
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