The Sikh Geek

Microsoft kindly gave us access to a Premium Office Live account after a great suggestion by Susanne to Microsoft. So, here is our initial effort for AMITRO. My initial thoughts are that we can really make good use of it. I’m spent some time this weekend looking at some aspects of it and has some great features. Our site will remain a work in progress for a while, so expect things to change and develop over time. The idea is that members of the Group will be given logins to the site which consist of an email account of the form username@amitpro.org. Since Office Live is built on Windows Sharepoint Services v3, then collaboration can be done through the Team Workspaces/Wiki and discussion forums. The look and feel of the site can be modified using Sharepoint Designer 2007 and I’ve opened up the site using this tool and it allows things like Webparts to be added. Another great feature of Office Live is that it can talk to external applications using web services and I’ve added the Contact Map Virtual Earth Mashup, which allows contacts to be added to the Business Contact Manager and then displayed in Virtual Earth. This would be really useful to see where each member is located for things like providing geographical support. So it terms of enhancement I’d like to investigate the ability to register for events online which should be feasible as you can add in web parts and ASP.NET code.

That’s the good stuff but there seems to be some limitations which are either real limitations or just my lack of knowledge at this point. There isn’t the ability to add a blog, eventhough WSS v3 supports this. I ended up using the Feedburner suggestion from the OfficeLive Blog but it’s not really what I’m looking for. There doesn’t seem to be a way of adding RSS feeds (through the templates), this can probably be done through code?

I’d be interested to hear from other people who’ve played around with this stuff as developer information is rather thin on the ground at the moment. If I get anything useful in terms of code, I’d be happy to share it with people.

UPDATE

• You can’t use Sharepoint Designer 2007 to change a public web site (the master page can’t be modified)
• RSS feeds can only be displayed but not created
• Server side code can’t be executed