Bamboo Solutions News & Articles

Want more proof that cloud computing is becoming very popular? Bamboo Solutions (news, site) has started up a new division focused on providing hosted solutions based on SharePoint.

The cloud is becoming a popular place, not everyone wants to deal with the licensing and deployment issues related to on premise solutions. Bamboo Solutions obviously sees an opening in the SaaS market that they can easily fill.

With SharePoint Online opening its doors to extensibility when it upgrades to SharePoint 2010, Bamboo has a potentially burgeoning market for its Web Parts, accelerators and applications. And there's room to develop even more. But that doesn't mean they should stop there.

The newly formed Bamboo Online Applications Group will develop and offer SharePoint based solutions themselves. The first of these Bamboo SaaS-based offerings will come sometime before the end of January in the form of collaboration solution. Called the Bamboo Requirements Manager (BambooRM™), it enables geographically dispersed teams to collaboration and communicate on demand.

Requirements Manager is just the start of a number of hosted solutions Bamboo will offer to small to medium sized businesses on a subscription basis. PMCentral, their flagship application, will also be offered as a hosted service at some point.

If you like SharePoint and you like the idea of someone else providing the application and platform for you, get ready to take Bamboo Online Applications for a trial run (they will offer trials).

Keeping with the theme of pricing and SharePoint today, we have a little something coming from Bamboo Solutions (news, site).

Bamboo, a provider of SharePoint solutions, web parts and other add-ons, has announced that they are giving away software to SharePoint Community groups as part of an initiative called The Bamboo SharePoint User Group Community Project. 

Bamboo Solutions (news, site) knows SharePoint. They dedicate their days and probably nights and weekends (on occasion) to designing and developing web parts, Solution Accelerators and other solutions that either enhance SharePoint or help you work better with it.

Think back to MashPoint, a data integration platform, custom, personalized navigation and the hack to run SharePoint on Vista. Add to that the number of Project Management components they offer and you know these guys have dug deep into the SharePoint platform and found gold.

Now they offer the first complete solution to ever come out of Bamboo and it's based on a topic they seem to know and love well, Project Management.

There are any number of SharePoint add-ons and web parts available today. We can't cover them all. But sometimes one crosses our path that we find interesting enough to pass on. That's how it was Friday when we told you about SharePoint Solutions's new Data Zoom Web Part.

And that's how it is today as we tell you about a new offer from Bamboo Solutions (news, site) called SharePoint Navigators -- a new tool that lets you customize and personalize the navigation for your users in Windows SharePoint Services (WSS3.0) or MOSS.

Bamboo Solutions provides a number of web parts and applications for the SharePoint platform. One that is particularly interesting is their MashPoint solution - a free version of the MOSS Business Data Catalog. Now that solution proves even more enticing as Bamboo announces a Mashpoint API which serves to offer a REST-based interface to not only MashPoint, but to SharePoint itself.

Bamboo Solutions dedicates itself to providing web parts and applications designed specifically to enrich the SharePoint platform. Just recently, we walked you through their Project Management Suite for SharePoint which offers things like a project management dashboard, team calendaring and alerting.

They are now taking that offering a step further by creating an OEM agreement with TeamDirection to include the Bamboo SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard web part in TeamDirection’s IntelliGantt Add-in for Microsoft Project.

Bamboo Solutions knows a lot about SharePoint. They should. Their business is focused on delivering collaborative business solutions based on the SharePoint platform. Their latest solution to hit the pavement is the Project Management Suite for SharePoint and it looks jam packed with functionality any project manager using SharePoint would drool over.

Microsoft Licensing is confusing at the best of times. If you’ve ever looked at their SharePoint 2007 licensing spreadsheet, then you’ll understand what a headache really is. Fear not though, because Bamboo Solution’s has come out with a tool that will help you figure out how much you will pay for SharePoint licensing before you have to talk to Microsoft themselves. And that may save you a bottle of aspirin.

Remember those guys who figured out how to hack Vista to allow you to run your SharePoint environment directly on the desktop and not within a vm? Well they are hanging out at Microsoft TECH-ED NORTH AMERICA 2008 this week and they have a product announcement that may interest many SharePoint developers.

It’s called Bamboo MashPoint and it’s a free data integration platform for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Note that important point — it’s for WSS3.0 which means you can start developing and integration enterprise applications into WSS without the need of MOSS and the Business Data Catalog.