SocialFest: Building Enterprise 2.0 Apps on SharePoint

By Barb Mosher | Published Feb 8, 2010

In a continued effort to extol the virtues of the upcoming SharePoint 2010 (news, site) platform, Microsoft created a special competition for seven startups in their BizSpark program. The competition? In one week create an Enterprise 2.0 solution on the SharePoint 2010 platform. Here are the results.

Coding Enterprise 2.0 Apps

At the end of January, for 1 week, seven startups involved in Microsoft's BizSpark program got to travel to Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus to participate in a special competition called SocialFest. The goal? To build, in just one week, an Enterprise 2.0 application on top of SharePoint 2010.

They didn't do it alone. The startups had round the clock support from SharePoint engineers, and apparently a lot of pizza.

Who were the startups? And what did they build?

Cortex Intelligence: A text mining company who also does sentiment analysis created a market intelligence service.
Confer: A communications platform that includes features like micro-blogging, status updates and real time chat extended their micro-blogging platform into the SharePoint installation.
Calinda Software: A company that supports the use of email, built a "mail space" grouping related conversations.
Huddle: A B2B workspace platform, extended their solution into SharePoint 2010 allowing enterprise teams to integrate external users into their workspace and enable the synchronization of document libraries into the Huddle network or other SharePoint sites.
Leverage Software: A provider of enterprise social networks created DesignSpaces, a solution that analyzes email and extract and organizes relevant data.
Liase: Another startup that focuses on getting relevant information out of email, extended its solution into SharePoint by doing real-time updates of information into Task/Issues Lists, Discussions, Calendars and Documents.
Loqu8: A company that integrates data lookup for things like lexicons and other references, integrated their solution into a pop-up that shows SharePoint 2010 lists and search results in the context of the work they are doing.

Now these all seem like interesting and useful Enterprise 2.0 applications. But only one gets to go home a winner. That winner was chosen by a panel of industry experts and the investor community, including Microsoft's own Christin Finn and Tom Rizzo.

So who won? Huddle for its B2B workspace platform. Here's a video describing what they built: