But there’s already one out there, and has been for over 12 months.
If you have solutions you would like to put in a store, drop me an email daniel@zevenseas.com.
We’ve done an incredibly lousy job of telling anyone about it, but we released it to deafening silence somewhere around March in 2009. The cool thing about it is that it works today, with SharePoint 2007, with BPOS, with Themes, Assembly-Free solutions and Web Parts like the Data View Web Part and Content Editor. To be clear, the store works with plain, vanilla, out-of-the-box SharePoint, nothing needs to be installed on SharePoint for this to work.
The most innovative thing about our store is that its not just a list of product that you can browse through and then download, its a store that knows SharePoint how to talk to SharePoint. Why is that important? Because it means that after you have told us a little bit about yourself, and your SharePoint sites, we can install the solution, directly into your SharePoint sites with just a single-click.
Our goal was to make it as easy to use as the Apple AppStore, and I don’t think we have done too bad, at least as far as the technology is concerned. To be clear though we ran out of steam, so the experience is not quite where I would like it to be. That said, here are a few screen shots so you get the idea.
Web Parts
Before:
ProduShare:
Then with just a single click on the “Install Now” button the After:
Themes
Then with just a single click on the “Install Now” button the After:
Try it out, it feels like magic!
I’m also more than happy to give online demos.
There are already a couple of solutions there for you to play with (twitter and a time sheet), but this brings me onto the reason I’m writing now. We think the whole AppStore idea for SharePoint was a little ahead of its time last year, in fact BPOS wasn’t released and very few people were aware of what could be done with Javascript and the Web Services. A lot has changed since then, and so over the last couple of moths we have been revisiting and renovating the storefront.
Call to action
Think of Produshare as the V0.9 Proof of Concept release for what we have coming very soon (new name, new UI and new features). Try it out, and most importantly, if you are someone with some cool solutions, and want a way to try and turn your software development skills and ideas into a professional pursuit, then drop me an email: daniel@zevenseas.com to have a chat about how we can work together.
While you are looking at our store, take a look at “TunnelPoint” too, its a BDC for SharePoint in the Cloud.