If you would like to discuss anything, please contact me via email: Howard.Bayliss@sequence.co.uk

Monday, December 5, 2011

SharePoint Radio Station

We turned SharePoint 2010 into a "Radio Station". Dan Haywood (Microsoft) writes: "This is probably one of the most impressive solutions I have ever seen built on SharePoint 2010"...

My company, Redweb, gives each team the opportunity to work on a Hack Project. We have 33 hours to conceive, build and present an innovative piece of work.

My team choose to create "Redio", a coroporate radio station that allows companies to play and stream live music across the Enterprise. In a nutshell, the solution included:

* Playlist creation - a user can select tracks from Spotify
* Scheduling of Playlists
* Ability to add adverts and "sweepers"
* Streaming of Spotify tracks from a central server to satellite PCs
* Streaming directly to client machines

The project was challenging enough; but we also needed to present to Microsoft. We did this via Lync and anyone from the Microsoft network could see what we did.

Full review by Dan Haywood: http://www.danhaywoodblog.com/2011/12/redweb-hack-day-produces-sharepoint-fis.html

Video of presentation: https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=9b7d796bd3e9e65c&resid=9B7D796BD3E9E65C!1228&parid=9B7D796BD3E9E65C!305&authkey=!AGjG73d414ceqm0


Here's just a couple of examples of the work we did...

* Our Senior Designer Luke produced an outstanding design for a SharePoint custom field.

With this field, end users can select tracks from Spotify using drag-and-drop. The meter allows users to add up to 30 minutes of music to a Playlist. After the Playlist has been created, it can be scheduled to play at a certain time.



* I created a Visual Web Part that shows the track currently playing. This uses the Bing API to dynamically download Album Art for the track.