Greetings from Vancouver, host city of the XXI Winter
Olympics, February 12-28, 2010!
I arrived here on Sunday to support the broadcast of the
Olympics on NBC, which will share the Games with US audiences in high
definition on its many networks and online at NBCOlympics.com. If you’ve read
my columns and articles over the years, you know I was lucky enough to act as
the Microsoft Technologies Consultant for NBC at both the Torino and Beijing
games. In fact, it was during Torino that I fell in love with SharePoint and
its ability to support rapidly deployed, “big win” solutions to collaboration
in an enterprise.
I am looking forward to sharing with you some of the things
we’re doing with SharePoint here in Vancouver, but I am pre-empted this week by
a really cool announcement from Microsoft itself, also about the Olympics and
SharePoint 2010.
I’m particularly thrilled to share with you that Microsoft
and the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) have teamed up to bring Winter
Games content and information to reporters through a new press portal powered
by <drum roll> SharePoint 2010. That’s right, the USOC’s PressBox
site is powered by the beta version of
SharePoint 2010 which, among other things, is a real testament to the strength
of the product even in its pre-release state.
Through the site, the USOC is able to provide journalists
covering the Games a single destination for accessing information about events,
participants, and venues. The site features articles, statistics, photographs,
and athlete information, adding depth and color to coverage. Building the site
on SharePoint 2010 technology, the site exposes RSS feeds to enable real-time
access to breaking news and personal updates from athletes who are using
Twitter, Facebook, and blog posts. SharePoint’s enhanced search enables
rich sorting of athlete information, sporting events, article authors, and
more.
Deploying content for an event like the Olympics is a
high-stress, big-stakes undertaking. The USOC is able to leverage the
capabilities, manageability, and scalability, of SharePoint 2010 to tackle the
challenge. And journalists can take advantage of the content in new,
dynamic ways.
It’s pretty amazing to me that all of this is being
entrusted to a version of SharePoint that is so new, it’s not even “finished” yet.
In the midst of a week that was characterized by hype around unreleased
devices, here’s an enterprise putting a tremendous amount of faith in a
product we can all get our hands on today.
Join me again on Monday for more news from Vancouver!
Dan Holme