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A while ago we had the idea to create an application that will display all the latest blogs posts from around the SharePoint Community. The application would have the following features:

  • An Admin page that allows a blog author to add their blog RSS url (as well as some metadata about them). Metadata would be RSS url, name, blog, category, location, keywords.
  • An Azure service that runs on a schedule that hits each RSS feed to check for the latest posts. If it finds one, it grabs it and stores it into a DB.
  • A service that exposes the latest posts via various protocols such as REST, RSS, etc.
  • A service that writes the posts to Buffer (so we can share to our social networks).
  • A client app that allows us to embed the posts on here and other sites The app should allow us to :
    • Include / exclude on keywords, category or even authors. Plus maybe posts containing certain words.
    • Like a post.
    • Share a post.
    • Comment.
    • Feature a post.
  • All the above but as a SharePoint App as well. (This would be great to use on the SP24 site and awesome learning for the community). 
  • We need a moderator screen to remove posts (SPAM) and flag posts as “featured” so they appear at the top. (Or flag authors and so all their posts get marked with “HOT”, or something similar.)
  • An email mechanism, where you can subscribe to new posts and get sent them in email.
  • A stats page showing, top posts, top authors, most commented, most liked, tables and charts filterable by time period and keywords.
  • The service should be written so that it is usable for different aggregated topics (not just SharePoint blogs). For example, if a person interested in fishing wants to setup a new aggregator he can do this. he then points the client apps to his service URL or token… (Not sure on best way for this).
  • Any other cool ideas you have!
  • You will need to blog regularly on here so we can see progress!

We also had agreement from Telerik to use their software to help build this – in return for a few mentions. I can kick this off if needed. Kendo UI looks pretty nice 🙂

To get this done I was thinking that we need a Team Leader and a small team of developers. I personally have very limited time until SP24 is complete (April 16th) so wouldn’t be able to do any development. 

With regards to funding – we have none! We can manage to provide some Azure hosting (probably out of Vlads MSDN subs) 🙂

Although we can’t pay, if you are willing to do it for love, it’d also give the following benefits :

  1. Be a great learning experience as you can use all the latest toys!
  2. We would showcase it (and the team) on here and on SP24. 
  3. We can also write a one-off Newsletter that gets sent to 35,000 SharePoint people 🙂
  4. We can post the blog posts on here of how you are building it.
  5. We can run a live video session (using the SP24 conference site) for you to show off how you did it.

I know we could probably something similar together with other apps like Scoop.It but the main goal is to build something bespoke for our needs and to provide the community with a great way to learn about the build as it’s happening…

Any willing takers ?

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