Recently (prior to SharePoint 2013 going RTM), Perficient Microsoft hosted their semi-annual Hackathon focusing on the new SharePoint 2013 App Model. We had 6 teams compete (one team was entirely remote with not a single person in the same room, ah the power of Lync!), and I was so amazed by the wide variety of solutions these teams created in their 7 and a half hours. Teams were limited to 4 people, were not allowed to use any pre-written code, and were responsible for their own development environments making the solutions even more awesome!
Our judges included Perficient’s CEO Jeff Davis, Microsoft’s SharePoint product group member Keenan Newton, who you may have seen as the keynote speaker at SharePoint Fest in Denver, and David Johnson, Jones Lang LaSalle’s global CIO. They had the very difficult task of choosing the winner out of the following solutions:
- The Grand Prize winning team extended SharePoint 2013’s social features to the Windows phone. They made an app to allow you to interact with your SharePoint newsfeed including push notifications to your phone!
- The People’s Choice Award went to the team who made an Office App that combined SharePoint and Lync to allow for persistent, in-document collaboration.
- One team created a solution to let users drag and drop files in SharePoint to Box (a cloud based document storage site similar to Dropbox). This was a great example of leverage OAuth distributed identity capabilities effectively (which we all know is not easy in a short time frame).
- Another team created a solution for IT departments to manage SharePoint 2013 apps and make deploying apps to their environment easier and use best practices as well!
- There was a BI solution made as a Windows 8 app for businesses to more accurately scope and size future projects by consuming data stored in SharePoint 2013 for past projects.
- And finally, there was a Showcase app for SharePoint to use as a portfolio for a company to demonstrate their offerings in a graphical and pleasing way.
Did I mention that each team only had 7 1/2 hours with no prewritten code?! I am always impressed with the expertise of the people I work with, especially with technology that hadn’t been released yet.
