The week between Christmas and New Years typically means lots of vacation time for our teams and it gets difficult to accomplish a lot being half staffed.  This year I decided to have the teams spend the week building a new MOSS site to improve our internal development processes with a Mashup Party thrown into the middle.

We try hard at KnowledgeLake to keep things fun and promote team interaction and what a better way than spending and afternoon (and evening) creating mashups.

The Mashup rules were simple; two person teams, public or KnowledgeLake internal sources and the participants pick the winners.  To make it hard to concentrate we turned the conference room into a Rock Band studio, added a couple cases of Bud and made sure everyone had enough food.

The winning team (Steve and Michelle) created a mashup called "Nag Someone".  They built an application that schedules text messages that can be sent out on demand or on a schedule.  It used a public service to determine the carrier based on the phone number and then sent the message to the correct carrier.

Second place was Brad and Chris who built an application that combined QA issues  lists to allow the QA team to quickly view, modify and add items to the current application being tested.

You're actually probably only reading this to check out the pictures so I'll stop typing and give you the link:

http://chrislcap.spaces.live.com/photos/cns!2B396B3160473E4C!1080/?startingImageIndex=3&commentsExpand=0&addCommentExpand=0&addCommentFocus=0&pauseSlideshow=0

I'm doing some guest editorials with ECM Connections and thought I'd pass along the link if you'd like to read them.  My first article can be found at http://www.ecmconnection.com/content/news/article.asp?docid={ABD9BAF6-D8C5-4E65-BACA-8A2EAC25F61E}.  This article is basically a redo of an article I wrote a couple years ago, but related to SharePoint 2003 and targeted at SharePoint users.  The new rendition is for 2007 and aimed at the Imaging industry.

Chris