This morning I had a small chat with the Dutch company Webstate (thanks Sander for the information) and they have released this really nice SharePoint software for the iPhone called iSharePhone. With this application you can view your entire SharePoint environment in a very slick way. I think it is the first mobile SharePoint experience that is really usable. With all respect to MS but the mobile views are not very good unfortunately.
Although I did not really touch it yet, I have no iPhone, I really think this could be great for road warriors. But the biggest breakthrough is that you would not need all kinds of specific applications anymore to do things like Twitter etc, you could all do it from a list by the help of TunnelPoint.
This application makes lists and attached functionality (workflows, TunnelPoint) more important again because you can do so much with it.
There are a few weak points in my opinion, and one is the business model. Right now they have nothing they can offer to partners while I think a model like TunnelPoint (access to multiple sites on different domains) could work out. As a partner we could setup our own hosted iSharePhone server and let people browse their sites through our server. We would manage the licenses and sell these to our customers.
Another thing i’m not sure off is the speed of this, will it work through a GPRS connection? And what about SharePoint online?
Anyway, a great piece of software that can be more awesome together with TunnelPoint. Use your list and TunnelPoint to get information from the web and show it on your iPhone, GREAT value!
You can point your iPhone here for a demo.
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Posted July 1, 2009 - 12:09
by Hans Blaauw
in
Last 6 months we have been working hard on the products that we released. This has all resulted in three operational products and we are all very proud that we pulled it off. For each of these products we are looking for partners and in below post we will outline what kind of partners we need on the long term.
ProduShare
For ProduShare we are looking for smart individuals or companies that like to build small and innovative solutions without using assemblies. We believe in small and simple solutions that add great value to existing SharePoint environments. Complex solutions are not always the greatest value for users, they sometimes look for very specific solutions for small problems and they are ready to pay for it.
With our integrated payment gateway and one click install you can make money from your solutions in an instance. We will take care of promoting ProduShare so that your solutions get noticed. Take action now to list your products inside ProduShare. Send an email to partner@zevenseas.com
TunnelPoint
For TunnelPoint we are looking for developers that are able to develop new web services for TunnelPoint. If you partner with us we can work together on marketing your web service to the global SharePoint audience. Please ping us on partner@zevenseas.com if you are interested.
Blogging platform
Our blogging platform is ready and we are looking for partners worldwide to sell our blogging platform. We think there are many opportunities for this product and we are ready to team up with your organization to sell the solution. A typical partner could install the product and also deliver consultancy. Ping us on partner@zevenseas.com to get more information.
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Posted June 15, 2009 - 12:42
by Hans Blaauw
in
Heather is a good friend of zevenseas and she will be visiting SharePoint Saturday in Chicago. Heather is a great SharePoint branding specialist (she worked with us a couple of times) and she works as an independent contractor (Waterman design Group) for companies like Vivid Office and Pixelmill.
Right now we work with her to get amazing branding packages inside ProduShare.com so that customers can easily one click install these inside their SharePoint environment.
During SharePoint Saturday she will have some time to demo our two solutions to you if you are interested. Probably the easiest way to ping her is on Twitter, her Twitter name is hwaterman. Of course you can also talk to her on her specialty, SharePoint branding.
We wish Heather a lot of fun and we thank her in advance for taking the time to show our products!
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Posted June 11, 2009 - 17:02
by Hans Blaauw
in
Last year we adopted Nic Nic and Splash (in the wild) and it has been a while since we received some news on them. I was a little worried something had happened to them but they have been wandering around and it seems a big group of Dolphins just arrived near Cardigan Bay.
However, Nic Nic and Splash are still not spotted but that seems to be normal because they just arrived and the new spotting team is just in place.
Will keep our visitors posted when we have some new pictures and stories :-)
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Posted June 5, 2009 - 08:56
by Hans Blaauw
in
Lately, because of my interest for the Palm Pre, I’m hearing more and more stories about HTML5. It is kind of weird, there is only a draft specification but it is already in the wild. Palm with its Pre is going to have HTML5 features like local storage and others are experimenting with it.
HTML5 has a few interesting features:
- Local database and storage. It looks like this feature is going to make it possible to automatically embed a local SQLdatabases if needed, so that people can take information offline.
- Vector graphics without plug-ins. This means that we can have animations and advanced graphs without Flash or Silverlight. Some of this is already implemented in IE8 by using the canvas element.
- Better tagging strategy, not every multimedia element is embed anymore. Every media element gets its own tag.
- Applications in the browser. Most important one, in-browser editing.
So how could this help SharePoint?
That is an interesting question but I have three things that popup in my mind immediately:
- Local storage/synchronization of Document Libraries and picture libraries without the use of third-party products;
- Easier to build reports, charts etc. without using external libraries;
- Better integration with applications.
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Posted May 30, 2009 - 15:47
by Hans Blaauw
in
User adoption.
The last couple of months I have provided training to multiple groups of people (max. 12 per session) and although a lot of people are enthusiastic about SharePoint user adoption is surprisingly low. To be honest, it scares me a little. IMO the users and SP specialists are out of sync. already for a while (adoption). I have tried to get my head around the figures (1 bil. revenue for SP) and I try to determine in which phase of the Technology Adoption Cycle we are. I’m not sure if we are past the second crack (between Early Adopters and Early Majority) or that we are moving towards the next crack (between Early Majority and Late Majority). If I read reports that 65% of the big companies in The Netherlands have (there is a huge difference between have and use) SharePoint we are obviously already in Late Majority. My problem however, I don’t believe it or feel it. My personal feeling says we are still in Early adopters and not passed the second crack.
The biggest problem is the difference between have and use. In Crossing the Chasm there is a lot of talk on buying and not much about using, there is a reason for that. The whole cycle is based on High Tech Marketing and as we all know marketing is about selling and not using :-)
However, when we use the same cycle for “using” I think we could determine the phase we are in with SharePoint. My feeling says that we just arrived in the Early Majority phase but we could also be in the second crack :-)
Why is all this stuff important? Well, if you want to make money with a product that is focusing on non IT people (and that is really what SP is all about) you need majority, that is the mainstream market and where the dollars are. All custom work is initiated there an not inside IT departments (surprised?). In almost every organization the business users pay the IT guys to drive innovation.
It is also interesting to watch this cycle if we talk about user adoption, if you believe in the cycle you probably know that the biggest chunk of the market still needs to arrive (early and late majority). That also means that the need for custom work (design, templates, workflows, code) will increase the coming years.
It is a logical sequence of operations, people start using the real features of SharePoint (instead of only document management) and demand for small customizations will grow rapidly.
Picture:
- Copyright (C) 2000,2001,2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
- 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA
- Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
- of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
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Posted May 30, 2009 - 14:13
by Hans Blaauw
in
I think here at zevenseas we are really convinced that sharing is good in general. All the things we do (codeplex, consultancy, products) is really focused towards sharing. My personal believe is that protecting knowledge is doomed to fail. I have had these experiences in the past when I started my IT career way back in the 80’s. At that time I was assistant admin for a Texas Instruments Unix environment (big noisy box). Our system admin was famous of suddenly leaving the company to do something else and then he delegated the admin stuff to me. However, what happened? He delegated it but he refused to give me the admin passwords etc., so basically I couldn’t do anything without calling him all the time. He was a good sample of protecting knowledge/information and not sharing at all (I hope he reads this).
The opposite of protecting knowledge and not sharing is sharing and giving people information to solve problems themselves, self care is a word we use for this nowadays. Self care can only work if people have enough information to gather knowledge or have the tools to collect new knowledge.
Overall I really think that collaboration is also a lot about sharing. You cannot collaborate if you don’t share anything :-) SharePoint is great for this and it allows users to do a lot of things themselves. Not all things need to be advanced (developers sometimes tend to think that) and the greatest piece can sometimes be something really simple.
Our product ProduShare is really a good sample. The number one reason for us was not to create an innovative product (one click remote SP install) but to create a place where we and our partners can share simple but also more advanced solutions. Some people will say, hey we have codeplex! Codeplex is great but I hardly know any non IT people that know what it is or does. And besides that, it is assembly stuff and that is another market that we don’t want to replace at all.
Just FYI, Sharing is good is a sentence used by Skype a lot.
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Posted May 30, 2009 - 13:32
by Hans Blaauw
in
This is a thing I always come across when somebody leaves a number without the international prefix, what is the dial code of this country?
Check out this URL for more good information and install or download a pre-fabricated list in your SP site with all the information you need. If there is something wrong in the list please let us know.
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Posted May 28, 2009 - 17:24
by Hans Blaauw
in
Weeks ago we launched TunnelPoint (our first product in the “no server touch” approach) and today we are ready to launch another BETA product, ProduShare.
ProduShare is an online catalog of SharePoint solutions (no DLLs please) that can be installed or downloaded with one click in your SharePoint enterprise- or BPOS environment. Currently several solutions are listed (SP Teamstatus, Timesheet and a few branding packages) but we are planning to extend this fast with the help of our current and new partners.
This product is all about partnerships. We are looking for (and already found) companies or individuals that share the same vision of small smart solutions that can add great value to SharePoint without the need to install anything on the server (on BPOS this is your only option right now).
ProduShare has some key features that are interesting for users and partners:
- One click install on hosted SharePoint environments (also BPOS);
- One click download if remote installation is not possible;
- Integration of a payment gateway (PayPal). Our partners can create new business with small solutions;
- Support for branding packages that are wrapped in a easy to understand .zip format (we will supply you with our partner guide on how to build these);
- Support for one masterpage file that can both be installed on BPOS and your normal SP environment (right now BPOS forces you to add something to your masterpage before installation);
- Fast deployment and activation of a branding package;
- One click “revert back” to the original branding;
- Easy to use catalog;
- etc.
In the current version of ProduShare there is an integration with TunnelPoint, so if you want to use ProduShare you need to do two things:
- Register;
- Register some of your SP sites inside TunnelPoint.
How it works
After your registration inside TunnelPoint you can login to ProduShare and start browsing the catalog.
If you have found what you like to use you can click Select and the following dialog will popup:
The options in this screen speak for itself. Install Now is the easiest option if you have a hosted or BPOS environment. Download is your option if you have SharePoint inside the firewall.
For partners
Please let us know if you want to list your solutions in our catalog. You can send an email to hans@zevenseas.com for a how to.
To get help
If you discover any issue with ProduShare please let us know on support@zevenseas.com
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Posted May 27, 2009 - 11:41
by Hans Blaauw
in
After some Tweets and re-tweets it looks like the site collection on our demo URL had some problems. It has just been fixed and the site is now viewable again.
If you really want to get your hands dirty please signup for a trial account of BPOS: https://mocp.microsoftonline.com/Site/ShoppingCartPage.aspx
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Posted May 18, 2009 - 19:26
by Hans Blaauw
in