For example, the company has built an application using mashups for analysts working with federal agencies who are first responders in a natural disaster like a hurricane or some other emergency. Those users might want to query by geography which airports are open in a specific area during a disaster, Comitz said.
"Then after that query they may want to find those airports that have runway lengths of 5,000 feet or greater with an eye toward landing a C-130 for rescue operations," he said. "That situation actually came up during some of the nature disasters of the last few years. It takes time to find that information [and] it is a manual process assimilating data from multiple sources. With the mashup technology, you can combine a couple of widgets and build an application where you can do that in near real time. It is a much more powerful paradigm to have a set of widgets, a toolkit of really basic capabilities that an operational expert or subject manner expert can combine in ways that you can't articulate in the conference room during the standard sort of development paradigm that large organizations do."
Also at the conference, Serena Software on Tuesday is slated to announce a new version of its Mashup Composer -- available in the third quarter of this year -- that is aimed at letting users drag and drop widgets, RSS feeds and Flash components into what the company calls Rich Interface Mashups. The tool will mix any kind of widget or Rich Internet Application including Adobe Flash, Amazon Search, Flickr, Microsoft Silverlight, YouTube and any of the 30,000 Google Gadgets, the company said. These can be "mashed" with businesses process and data from internal applications to deliver these Rich Interface Mashups, said Tim Zonca, Serena's director of product marketing. These mashups are made of widgets that are aware of what information is changing in an enterprise and can update themselves automatically to make sure that a user has the most recent information, he said.
Finally, Microsoft's new Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS), due to be detailed, is a free open-source initiative aimed at providing companies an easy way to create, manage and distribute podcasts. PKS is built on the SharePoint Server and Microsoft Silverlight platforms and is compatible with the Zune, Windows Mobile devices, PCs and other devices that play podcasts.
According to Microsoft, PKS allows users to:
- Share content by producing personal podcasts and publishing content on PKS;
- Connect with podcasters via integrated instant-messaging programs;
- Find the most relevant content using a rating system, tags clouds and search functions;
- Receive automatic podcast updates by subscribing to RSS feeds;
- Play podcasts in real time using Silverlight and progressive playback.