After a long period of development and testing, we feel ready to release our hosted service to visitors of our sites who we think will appreciate the solution on offer. It is a BETA release (as in REALLY a Beta, not as in a Google Beta), hosted online, and we would really appreciate your feedback!
 
A new SharePoint product is born
Almost a year ago, we came up with an idea to create a service which made customization to SharePoint easier, cheaper and faster. To achieve this, we felt we needed an approach which was accessible to the people who actually use the product every day, not just the IT folks who manage the servers. In essence, we wanted to create a way to customise SharePoint without touching the SharePoint servers, in the process eliminating maintenance headaches and improving overall ROI.
 
And the good news is, we've done it. By applying a little creativity to the SharePoint web services (available across the SharePoint family) we can deploy simple but powerful solutions with just a few clicks.
 
The Service
What can it do? Our new service acts as a broker between SharePoint and the thousands powerful data services and APIs (corporate and external) in three steps:
 
1. Connect
You connect your SharePoint environment by telling us which sites you use most often and which sites you want to extend with our "assembly free" solutions. You connect these sites to any number of services offered, things like: SMS, Driving Directions, Twitter update, Short URL conversion, Currency conversion, Stock quotes etc. Of course this is just the beginning, the platform allows us to add services quickly, just let us know what you would like to see.

Let me show you some screenshots how this can be accomplished, first we establish a connection with a SharePoint site you have:

(above screen is to authenticate against a SharePoint site, we will automatically recognize the authentication method)

You can repeat the connection steps for all sites that you are a member of.

The next connection that you can setup is the connection with the different services that we offer. In below screenshot we show a sample interface screenshot of the Twitter Update service. What this services does is obvious, it sends a Twitter status update from a SP list. In the first part you can pick a SharePoint URL that you registered before or you can Create a default list with columns that you need for this service.

After that you can select a populated list and optionally Create default fields needed for the service in the list:

In this specific case you also need to specify your Twitter username and password:

Then you need to tell the service which fields you want to use for the message and the message update status:

And the last step is to select a data collection schedule (see below):

After clicking Save the data collection engine of TunnelPoint will start collecting and updating the configured services.
 
2. Collect
After creating the connections, TunnelPoint does the data collection, transforming the information from the web service into a language SharePoint can understand. It can extend or create lists that fit the purpose, populating them according to a schedule you define, putting you, the end user, in charge.

After the data collection is done it can show the information in an out-of-the-box SharePoint list. Below sample is a SP list connected to the Twitter search API:

 
3. Collaborate
SharePoint is built to enable better collaboration, by combining our service, with out-of-the-box list functionality, it makes it possible to create hybrid solutions using features like: email alerts, workflow, Office integration, etc. You can even combine our services to create specialised mashups, for example, setting a workflow on a Stock which then sends an SMS notification if the price starts to tumble.

We have build several solutions by combining services, take a look at: http://demo.zevenseas.com/sites/tunnelpoint Most of these solutions don’t need any server side installation or configuration, only Daniel’s Tagged Links solution (available on the demo URL) needs an install.
 
The platform
The internet today offers thousands of APIs and data services, with the number beginning to grow exponentially. Today we are offering a select number of useful services, and plan to grow this based on your feedback as quickly as we can. The platform has been built with speed of deployment in mind, using open standards where possible (REST, XML, WADL), and in time we will be supporting in-house Enterprise deployment.

The real power lies in the flexibility to develop new services fast, our aim was to make it possible to build a new service in 1-2 days and not weeks :-)
 
In Summary
TunnelPoint allows you to do "sharepoint customisation without server customisation".

If you want to check it out yourself please visit this URL to register for an account, requests need to be approved by a moderator.