The Sikh Geek

One of the things that intrigued me when I first heard of OfficeLive was that it had a developer framework. I’ve been playing with the Contacts Mashup and trying to understand what’s possible. This Mashup uses a combination of ASP.NET and JavaScript to map contacts in the Business Contact Manager Application in OfficeLive to Virtual Earth which is displayed within OfficeLive. The ASP.NET provides the layout of the windows and your restricted as to what can be executed on the server side. The JavaScript makes web services calls to the OfficeLive Business Contact Manager and to Virtual Earth to bring the two together. The ability to make web services calls is a very powerful feature and means you can interact with anything that is exposed as a web service. One example of this might be integrating OfficeLive with Amazon’s S3 web services for things like E-Commerce and Storage. The advantage of Amazon’s web services is that you only pay for what you use and the services are massivly scalable. These are only thoughts, I’ve not tried this but it should be feasible through standard REST and SOAP interfaces.

Another powerful feature of OfficeLive is the ability to develop client applications which can authenticate to your site using Windows LiveID and then interact with the Sharepoint Lists etc. The only thing is that information is a little thin on the ground and developing using Visual Studio 2005 is basically using it as nothing more than an editor. I wonder if Orcas will allow you to create an “OfficeLive” project? Also, how do you effectively debug your system because you have to keep uploading your files to OfficeLive and running them and seeing what errors appear. There’s no deployment mechanism for applications such as the Contact Mashup.

What’s really nice is that you can use Sharepoint Designer 2007 to develop new applications based on Sharepoint Lists/Workspaces and workflow.

So, OfficeLive is in no way a “noddy” framework and is quite powerful being based on Sharepoint Services v3.0. I think it’s missing two major features at the moment which are creating RSS feeds and configuring Blogs within the framework. I’m sure the platform will develop over time. For the Premium Service at £22.99 per month for 20 users, this is amazing value!! Could you run your business on this? I cannot see why not! 

P.S. OfficeLive in the UK comes out of beta on 23rd May 2007.