I don’t know if you have been following the posts from Hans and Daniel about TunnelPoint and (the assembly free solution store called) ProduShare but I wanted to express my feelings about the products we have launched.. Though I was a bit skeptical at first when we started months ago.. but now as both products have launched I’m really proud and have much believe that the product will be a succes :)
Why? Well.. well hopefully because we are the first ones who took the path of (the more popular getting) talking to SharePoint without using the Object Model and taking the next step..
Just to show you that the clientside ‘development’ is getting more popular, check out these posts:
I bet you are probably asking yourself “so what do TunnelPoint and ProduShare” have to do with this? Well.. let me tell you..
TunnelPoint, this is basically “the BDC in the cloud” (copyright by Daniel). What it does it connects a SharePoint list with a webservice that is available in the cloud, so it’s actually a broker between SharePoint and the cloud. So instead of a webpart that is showing stockqoutes in your site, we push stockqoutes in your SharePoint list. Meaning that it is SharePoint data.. and you know what that means.. it means that you can act on it and use it using out-of-the-box SharePoint functionality like alerts, workflow, views with totals, max, sum’s that creates a much more richer experience than a simple webpart does that shows data that is and stays external.. Imagine that with the availability of hundreds of webservices/api’s that provide some sort of value that you want to have in SharePoint.
ProduShare, we all know the fantastic 40 templates right? We all know custom themes right and masterpages right? What is the downside of these things right now? They require server access to be installed (well maybe not the masterpages (but that’s detail ;)).. so what if you have a SharePoint environment where you cannot touch your server, like SharePoint online for example. Or you are a power-user and your IT department won’t let you use SharePoint Designer to customize your site. Well now, if your SharePoint environment is accessible via the internet, you can customize with a single click using ProduShare! ;) Just think of it as the Appstore for the IPhone but then for SharePoint..
Please note, this post probably sounds very commercial but it’s really not my intention.. though of course I’m very biased about this whole thing since it’s our own product ;)
If you are interested in what some folks of the community thought about TunnelPoint check out the following posts :
And if you want to be informed with all the things that are currently going on with these products or you want to try it out and give us feedback, tune into Hans’s blog! :)