Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Wed 14 Oct 2009

This week we’ve launched the Brantas Customer Access Portal, if you are a customer with a registered support agreement you will be able to easily view and maintain your active cases. 

How have we done this?  We’ve integrated our support management system (Dynamics CRM) with the eService Accelerator for CRM from codeplex, mix that with Brantas’ knowledge of web technologies (including ASP.Net, CSS and xHTML) and the result is a fully branded, customised portal for our customers.

We’re also currently working on a SharePoint Designer Activity tutorial to go on the site later this week.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Mon 27 Jul 2009

We’ve now integrated Twitter and MOSS so that users never have to leave the portal to tweet.  Sounds useless right?  I mean all it does is post a message to your twitter page and get your twitter status back. 
On MOSS/SharePoint 2007

On Twitter

Suppose though you have a tighly locked down network and dont want your users wasting their entire day on Twitter.  You can lock out access from Twitter altogether, but that means your users and staff may feel constrained at work and eventually their productivity may drop.  Why not allow them to update their Twitter using their own My Site?  It gives users apparent freedom to maintain their social circle yet because they are within your organisations MOSS Portal work is never far away.

Non-Twitter users aren’t left out as they still get to see the Twitter status on the site, even though they may not have a username or password.

Use the Brantas Tweet web part on their mysite, your users will feel they have a bit of freedom, but at the same time you can ensure that users dont spend all day on Twitter. 

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Wed 22 Apr 2009

Apple - Used by creative and design conscious people as it has a much easier on the eye interface.
Microsoft - Used by companies as it gives administrative users control over the network with a much more manageable overhead.

Never the two shall meet….until today that is.  Having to use undocumented calls was bad enough; having to use undocumented calls from a Microsoft.Net platform to a python/bsd Apple platform was even worse!  There was no way for us to code as you would by referring to an SDK instead we had to code by exception.  Using a code, compile, exception, re-code cycle which took us far longer than we wanted, or anticipated.  Thankfully by using the http://www.xml-rpc.net/ XmlRPC assemblies we were able to get it working.  I have to admit, this was actually a lot of fun despite it making me want to tear what little hair I have out.

The result?

A web part which allows a user to view authenticated RSS feeds from an Apple Podcast Producer server within Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 without ever having to navigate away from the site.

Rather than make the users have to enter the RSS feeds which they have access to manually, we decided to make it automatic, all the users need to do is provide their “Mac Open directory” credentials for the web part to authenticate with and the rest is done for you!

Whats more, as you probably dont have a mac server published on the wide open internet, the webpart also introduces a proxy function which will fetch content without having to publish the podcast producer computer to all and sundry.