The We Are Microsoft event has come and gone - I really can't say enough good things about the event and it's successes. There were 18 teams volunteering for 18 different charities including applications ranging from internal communications and scheduling to data-entry, time tracking and even Palm Pilot entry and synchronization. Truly each charity needed something different and Microsoft provided the means for developers to fulfill those needs.
Team Telligent got assigned the Spina Bifida Association of North Texas who, conveniently, wanted something that focused on our specialities: a community geared website with a user-friendly content management system ... Can anyone say Community Server and GraffitiCMS hybrid?
Our team did a slam-dunk job on this, skinning Graffiti and CS as well as doing some customizations (including a second install of Graffiti for the Spanish language site) in under 3 days; it was estimated that each of the core members of the team were there for over 24 hours between Friday evening and Sunday morning. Check out these links to see what we created and, until it gets moved to production, what their site was before: staging | production.
Some quick facts (from our official press release) on the project:
- The team at Spina Bifida Association of North Texas (SBANT) wanted to support a number of features such as groups, blogs, forums, site search, photo/movie galleries, etc.
- The goal of the SBANT was three-fold: (1) to realign its marketing efforts with the national association, (2) to communicate better with its constituents, and (3) to easily disseminate info while building its online community.
- The Telligent team built three sites (an English site, a Spanish site, and an online community site).
- Over 20% of the Telligent Dallas staff participated in the “We Are Microsoft” Charity Challenge.
- The Telligent team worked around the clock and completed a month’s worth of work in just two days.
I want to thank everyone who participated - remote, local, full time, part time, coffee runs, development, management moral support and financial support all the same:
Aonis Bitar (Skinning & QA), Blake Niemyjski (Yahoo! data migration), Jim Martin (CS Skinning & Lead), Ken Hanson (Markup Genius), Kevin Harder (Graffiti Skinning & Product Guru), Nicole Keith (can anyone say mid-day Starbux? & moral support Sunday too!), Rob Howard (always helps when CEO joins the team!), Steven Ray (amazing design), Jason Alexander (project management), me (whatever those smarter than I said to do)
Each person who participated, no matter the amount of physical effort they put in, really helped the 5 of us who were in the grind all weekend get through it... without each of those people popping in and out of our days who knows if we would have made it through the weekend with the completed project!
And in case you were wondering about the charity's response to our job-well-done:
“This was a huge initiative for us. The new Spina Bifida site not only enables us to communicate with our constituents online, but our ability to now support our large Spanish-speaking community is a huge win for us. During the scope of the project, the Telligent team was very approachable, very willing to do whatever it took to get the job done, and was a pleasure to work with. I was very impressed with the team and would use them again in a heartbeat.”
--Jason Duncan, Web Master and Board Member, Spina Bifida Association of North Texas.
Thank you Microsoft for putting together the We Are Microsoft Charity Challenge - and if you are interested in joining us the next time we do something like this be sure to let us know ...
