Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
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Workgroup Twitter for SharePoint 2007, a very slick proof-of-concept
created by Daniel McPhearson of Zevenseas [10], was considered and
although we liked the solution it was rejected for the simple reason that
it was limited to providing microblogging capability to a workgroup/
team and could not scale to support organisation-wide microblogging.
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An internally developed desktop client that allowed users to send short
messages to and receive updates from a user specifi ed SharePoint list
was also available. This tool was used extensively for a number of
different applications but for our initial purposes was rejected for the
same reason of scope as the Zevenseas Workgroup Twitter application.
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Status.Net [11] a FLOSS microblogging platform that was being actively
developed and supported was our ultimate choice. This solution provides
all of the ease-of-use and similar functionality to Twitter but is based on
the OStatus standard [12] for interoperability between installations.
Within not much more than a day, Status.net was downloaded and
installed on a virtualised environment running on a spare Windows PC.
A new icon was created to replace the default Status.net icon and launched
to the alpha testing community as 'Pfollow' (Figure 13.2). Various other
aspects of Status.net were quickly tweaked, most signifi cantly the new
user creation and login modules were customised to utilise our existing
company-wide authentication infrastructure and a completely new URL
shortening service based on YOURLS [13] was implemented and
integrated into our Pfollow instance.
At this stage of exploring a microblogging capability, we had identifi ed
Status.net as our go forward solution and had performed preliminary
testing with our alpha testing community. On the basis of this we had
confi dence that it was ready to move into Proof of Concept phase being
both stable and scalable. In the next phase we would be opening up
Pfollow to a wider audience and focusing on understanding how
microblogging could deliver business value. Details of these learnings
are presented below.
13.2.3 Proof of Concept phase
The key deliverable from this phase is a decision as to whether a capability
delivers business value and if so what the requirements of the service are.
In making this decision the following questions needed to be answered.
Does the technology actually work in the workplace? Can it integrate
into real world workfl ows? What use cases demonstrate business value?
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