By: Nicole Pitts
The F8 Facebook conference held in San Franiciso took place today and a number of big announcements that will change how you and your end users will interact with not just Facebook, but with other sites you already know (and probably love).
The partnership that caught my eye was with Microsoft. It looks like Facebook/MS will be working together to compete against Google Docs with a website called Docs.com. What this partnership does is allows Facebook friends to share, collaborate & create MS Office documents. Everything I’ve read so far says this was build on MS Office 2010, but it’s unclear if you need to have this latest version to use docs.com (I’m guessing no). The service is not yet open, but once it is I’ll be able to test out how it works. If you’re interested in using this service in your Facebook account you can visit the Docs.com website and signup via the Facebook link. Once it is available you will receive an email to begin using the service.
So how does this effect schools? If you read my previous post, you remember that setting up a Fan Page within Facebook for your school is an important way to interact with your past & present students. While it is still unclear if the collaboration can easily be integrated into the Datatel Portal (running MOSS 2007), this new integration may provide a different view of document sharing. I will be keeping up with this story as it develops and look to see how it the features can be integrated into a web part.
There were other announcements at the F8 conference, but the Docs.com integration I think has the most potential to provide a great user experience for everyone on campus (and potential a IT admins worst security nightmare). Time will tell as more details are released and users have a chance to try out the new features.
Update: it does look like there is a group creating a Facebook Developers Toolkit. The project is being managed on Codeplex, so be sure to check back to this location for any updates.
