Bamboo MashPoint^™ is the First Product Offered via Bamboo Labs, a New Online Destination and Showcase for Emerging Products and Technologies from Bamboo Solutions

Microsoft Tech-Ed 2008
June 10, 2008, 10:18 AM Eastern Daylight Time

ORLANDO, Fla.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Bamboo Solutions today announced the release of Bamboo MashPoint™, a free platform that enables the integration of external data sources in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Bamboo MashPoint will provide a unifying framework, enabling Bamboo Web Parts to communicate and interact, adding more power and functionality to Bamboo’s market-leading portfolio of products. MashPoint is the first of many products that will be previewed via Bamboo Labs, an online destination and showcase for early-stage products and technologies from Bamboo that enhance Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

Bamboo MashPoint provides the ability to seamlessly integrate Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployments with existing enterprise applications using APIs that are 100% consistent with the Microsoft BDC (Business Data Catalog). By using Bamboo MashPoint, businesses can protect their investment in enterprise applications when migrating from Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Bamboo MashPoint provides relationship mapping between various data sources to enable a single distribution point of information. With MashPoint, organizations with SharePoint Products and Technologies deployments will be able to integrate Bamboo’s family of commercial web parts to any Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment, web service, or external data source. Bamboo MashPoint enables the creation of mash-ups from internal databases along with Web 2.0 services and the ability to aggregate and view information from non-SharePoint Products and Technologies applications. MashPoint also enables social network capabilities by discovering user profiles and connection points.

Bamboo MashPoint is being released through Bamboo Labs, an online site designed to provide developers with free pre-release editions of new products and services from Bamboo before they are officially released on Bamboo’s online store. Collaborating with the community on these early releases further integrates Bamboo’s user community into the software development process at an early stage in order to fuel product enhancements and drive new product ideas. Support for products released to Bamboo Labs along with feedback mechanisms is provided through a community forum in the labs. Visitors can test new products in a hosted demo environment, get access to use cases, and installation guides, and download products for free at: community.bamboosolutions.com/labs.

“Our customers want to use SharePoint Products and Technologies as a way to aggregate all kinds of existing information within their organizations,” said Michael Tanner, CEO of Bamboo Solutions Corporation. “Our vision for Bamboo MashPoint is to make it easy to accomplish that goal. Most importantly, MashPoint will let customers of SharePoint Products and Technologies maximize their investment in time and effort, and simplify the migration to SharePoint Server 2007 should they decide to do so in the future.”

“Bamboo Solutions has been focused solely on enhancing SharePoint Server with Web Parts,” said Tom Rizzo, director of SharePoint at Microsoft Corp. “With MashPoint, Bamboo is attempting to maximize the power of Web Parts solutions, bring all corporate information into Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and provide investment protection for SharePoint Server customers to upgrade to SharePoint Server 2007.”

“We believe that the most successful commercial software will be developed in an active and collaborative partnership between vendors and their end-users. Bamboo Labs is our way to enable this partnership. We want to provide a place where the SharePoint Products and Technologies community can experiment, try, test, and provide feedback about potential new offerings before they are formally released as products. Bamboo MashPoint is the first product to be offered to the market in this way,” said Tanner.

Bamboo Solutions provides a suite of Web Parts, Solution Accelerators, and customized products for project management, social networking, business intelligence, portal administration, and content management for SharePoint Products and Technologies. In the past two years, over 3,000 customers across 38 countries have benefited from Bamboo’s software development agility, using Bamboo software to implement their SharePoint Products and Technologies portals in record time. Customers can easily try, test, and buy from the online store and gain access to additional resources through Bamboo’s partner network. Bamboo Solutions is headquartered in Reston, Virginia, USA, with offices in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. For more information, visit https://bamboosolutions.com.

SOURCE: BusinessWire