Alpa Agarwal

By Alex Mermod, CEO, Calinda Software

The Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SocialFest was a very code-intensive week for the Calinda software development team. We arrived at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus at 8AM, coded non-stop until 10PM, just to drive back to the hotel and resume coding at the hotel into early morning. We got only 3 to 4 hours of sleep each day, before starting over. The steady supply of food and drinks and the great organization by the Microsoft team made this possible.

We were very ambitious. We wanted to take advantage of many features of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 such as the Silverlight webpart, connectable webparts, social search, Business Connectivity Services and the ribbon. The presence of top Microsoft experts proved invaluable in helping us solve our challenges. We developed a few really cool things: We integrated a dynamic, interactive Silverlight map of team email conversations into SharePoint. We also integrated the ability to automatically search the social network to find experts within an organization on the issues being discussed in email.

Although we finished 2nd in the competition, our huge reward was SharePoint Director Christian Finn mentioning that MindUP for SharePoint addressed a pain very commonly reported by many SharePoint customers! More than ever, MindUP is the SharePoint mailspace all SharePoint customers need to leverage the power of SharePoint and start managing the conversational dimension of their projects!

We ended the hard, but productive week with wine tasking and a tour of the beautiful San Francisco Bay Area. See our famous sculpture of the “Three exhausted developers at the end of SharePoint 2010 SocialFest” by Calinda Rodin.

Read & watch video’s about the applications built by the seven startups at Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SocialFest.