We’ve been big Twitter fans at zevenseas, in fact it has been 3 years since I first jumped in (@danmc, 27 December 2006 according to http://www.whendidyoujointwitter.com/). We have found it a great way to connect, and more importantly, stay connected with SharePoint people around the world . It’s not only a great way to get questions answered, but allows you to let people know what you are working on and provides a forum for the sort of unexpected learning that you used to get around the water-cooler in the office.
Just under a year ago we launched an “Assembly Free” solution for SharePoint 2007 called “Team Status”. It demonstrated the important features of twitter running entirely within SharePoint, and further, it did it without the need to install anything on the server. It proved to be one of our most popular posts ever, had lots of downloads, and some from the community even grabbed it and made it better.
When 2010 came out, we immediately saw the opportunity to make our solution even better. With 2010 “Assembly Free” solutions are going mainstream, this is thanks mostly to the brand new, elegant and super powerful Client OM. This initial version we are calling TeamTalk is a port of our previous Team Status application, but using the SharePoint 2010 ECMAScript library.
The best bit is that we have our first beta version ready for you to download.
TeamTalk 2010
On the left you can see a steady stream of messages from anyone who is a member of this team site, on the right you have your 140 character message composer, and below that, a list of any messages sent directly to you.
Installation is very straight forward and has been tested on the SharePoint 2010 Beta Only.
1. Download the “TeamTalk 2010” solution file
2. Upload the solution file into the “Solution Gallery” of a site collection where you would like to host a “Team Talk” site.
3. Activate the solution.
4. Create a new site, select the “TeamTalk 2010” template.
Done!
There are two ways to add pictures to a persons updates:
- Complete your MySite profile by uploading your picture
- If you are just using SharePoint Foundation, then add a new column to the “Users and Groups” table called “PictureUrl” (Single line of text). Each user can then modify this property, adding a URL to a picture of them, and you are ready to go.
We are committed to fixing bugs and moving this forward based on your feedback, so please don’t hold back. You can give feedback right here on this blog post, or if you want a direct response, email me: daniel@zevenseas.com