Well this is my first ever blog post on SDN and a fitting time to begin I think since I'm on my return flight from SAP TechEd Amsterdam 2006. I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent with the community this week and look forward to more of the same in the future. Demojam was electric and I had the pleasure of hanging out with 2 time Demo Jam winners, Dan and Ed from Colgate-Palm Olive, with their SAPLink tool, great guys, as well as Tarun Telang from SAP India who won 3rd place in Las Vegas for the cool widgets he created for monitoring and administrating an SAP system. Unfortunately he didn't make the top 3 this time round but I like his chances for TechEd Bangalore in 3 weeks :-). I'm very excited by the energy which is building up in the community around the topic of Software Downloads. Of course, I'm biased since this is one of the key initiatives my team is working on right now in Emerging Solutions Imagineering. I hope you've been checking out and enjoying the widgets, blog posts and pod casts on the topic. Eric Wood is heading up the initiative and I'm sure you have noticed the great contributions from the virtual team that is growing by the day, notably from, Fred Samson, Eliot Tarlin, Hamilton Meyer, John Astill, Frank Brackmann, David Kang, Tarun Telang and others. Of course, we have a great champion behind us on SDN in Craig Cmehil who I had the pleasure of meeting in person this week. I swear he was a DJ in a former life. He did a great job as the warm up act for Demojam. We need to see more of him in this type of role in the future 😉 No pressure Craig 😄 Obviously, there was a limit to the number of people I could meet at the TechEd conference so to get a broader sense of what the SDN community thinks of the enterprise widget concept I would love to hear from you on this. Some general questions to begin with, feel free to expand on this... 1) Have you ever created/experimented with widgets, i.e. Dashboard, Yahoo, Google, Vista gadget etc.? 2) What do you like/dislike about widgets? 3) Do you think widgets will be useful in an enterprise context? 4) What challenges do you foresee with developing and deploying widgets inside your enterprise? 5) Are you running widgets in your enterprise right now? If so, how popular are they with your end users? 6) Do you plan on sharing your widgets with the community here on SDN? I'm looking forward to hearing your comments. Thanks.
