Tuning in to Redio with Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010
The 1st and 2nd of December marked a very special time for our SharePoint team, it was a date they had been keenly waiting for, it was when they finally got to roll their sleeves up and attack a hack project.
SharePoint2010
Our team is made up of a handful of very talented developers who are passionate about SharePoint, a CMS they work with everyday, almost to the point of obsession. We had started a few weeks before, meeting regularly to talk about some of key areas in which SharePoint could help us. We looked into; SharePoint My Sites, search and indexing, business intelligence, connectivity to external business apps, and content management and asset libraries. Our final solution uses a little of each of these, with one of the most overheard phrases during the 32 hour hack project being:
“Don’t worry, SharePoint already does that”
The problem
We’ve been putting a lot of work into our office recently, we have new collaborative areas, a hideaway suite, our innovation lab of course, and a lot of new cool things on our walls – murals & whiteboards, paste walls, world records, books, quotes, awards and photos. But there’s often one thing missing – music
It seems like our studio’s so large these days that tunes can be a bit of a problem. If we play something one end, it’s often so quiet the other end that it’s annoying. If we turn it up then half our staff can’t hear themselves think. Then there’s the added problem of agreeing on what to listen to, and the curse of everyone employing earphones which can be horribly anti social.
The solution
The team decided they would come to the rescue by building Redweb radio, or Redio, where everyone would have a DJ profile, be able to make play lists and schedule them into the weeks programme. In addition we’d have collaborative play lists, theme days, voting on play lists, and, very excitingly, everyone would be able to record and publish their own adverts or announcements that we’d insert randomly before set expiry dates.
Inputs
To avoid most of the music legal issues we decided not to import everyone’s MP3 files, and instead concentrated on streaming in music from web based services like Spotify, SoundCloud, Lastfm, GrooveShark and YouTube. Ads & announcements are captured with webcams, built in mics and standard Windows applications
In the middle
SharePoint helps us with profiles, scheduling, calendars, notices, libraries, archives and managing the music playback. It was great to have such a robust and functional system at the core holding everything together
Outputs
The output is a music stream, split into half hour slots from one DJ at a time, so everyone gets an equal chance to play whatever they want. It’s going to be interesting to see how it works.
The stream also contains Redio stings, and staff generated announcements at random points, to help fill the gaps between play lists
Aaaarggghhh!
It sounded like a simple plan but as ever with hack projects there’s always something hiding around the corner to give you a nasty surprise. With Redio, we had more than our fair share of corners and some very nasty surprises. We’re still working on some of these right now, including legal issues and the stringent T&C’s of various streaming services.
We had various playback problems too which we got round by having all our players on one ‘HQ’ machine. This ‘HQ’ machine was told what to play by SharePoint, but it was muted to avoid time lag with our ‘satellite’ machines. It was these ‘satellite’ machines that had speakers attached and which boomed out the music, each one reading and mirroring the soundcard of ‘HQ’
Phew!
All that was left was to present Redio to the rest of Redweb, and for extra excitement, we were joined by Dan Haywood from Microsoft’s Digital Marketing Platform Group, via a Lync video call. The team took a big gulp when he told us he’d shared the live video URL with others at Microsoft and the twitterverse.
With just minutes to go before the deadline we finally got everything working for the first time.
Dan recorded our presentation and you can view it on Microsoft’s Skydrive here
And here’s the full #RedwebHack7 photo set from the two days
Thanks for tuning in!
