Jul23

Will Silverlight take off in the Enterprise?

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We’ve been working on some stuff at Lightning Tools to create solutions using Silverlight 2.0 beta 2. To us the idea of Silverlight is great, rich internet applications, with zero javascript. Awesome! But we’re left with a few things we’re wondering over before we start pushing things out to get feedback. The two things that are pretty much ready for beta are the SharePoint Silverlight Forums which I’ve mentioned before and a Silverlight ToDo style list application also for SharePoint

The points I’m currently pondering…

1, Will large corporations roll out Silverlight to their desktop PCs? Many places I go to have just upgraded from Office 97 to Office 2003 (which may have been a licensing-cost issue) so lots of places are slow to let clients install the latest new thing. How many places allow Flash to be installed? (I’m guessing this is pretty high?)

Of course with Silverlight requiring a WCF layer to write data back this means we can easily swap out the Silverlight front end for standard html web parts – but that’s getting away from the Silverlight point :-)

2, The feedback from the people who have tried out the SharePoint Silverlight Forums has been to improve the look and feel. At Lightning Tools at the end of the day we’re all coders and so making things ‘look nice’ is tough! So I think we have 2 options:

a, Work with/Employ a design agency with experience of Silverlight 2.0 to refine and perfect the user experience of our tools.

b, Customers are always going to have different look and feel requirements, and one of the aims of Silverlight is to show how easily designers can make solutions look great with Expression Blend. So our second idea is to sell the solution with complete source code. This gives each customer the chance to go with our style as it is, or go completely crazy and change it completely.

Obviously supplying source code always has it’s own risks and problems – but ideally it would be a great solution if we lived in a fair and ideal world.

So dear reader what do you think? Will Silverlight be deployed to the enterprise and what would you do about the look and feel? (or as a customer would you love to buy a Silverlight solution with source code?)

 
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Comments

On 24 Jul 2008 12:21, Kanwal Khipple said:

I think its still going to be a while before corporations take on Silverlight for their business applications. What I'd love to see and sometime I have suggested this to my own clients is Silverlight and SharePoint integration! Now that's a great platform for Silverlight to ride in on.

On 28 Jul 2008 10:14, Andy Burns said:

Well, I think silverlight might take off for WCM, but internally, I'm not so hopeful. I still see a lot of companies using Office 2003, and have things like Access front-ends to databases, and the like. I think that within a business there is a certain 'so long as it works, it doesn't have to look really pretty (but it must have out colour and logo)' attitude. I mean, if they were that keen, we'd see more Flash used on Intranets; I've only seen a little used, once. It isn't like Silverlight is doing something fundamentally new. But like I say, for WCM I think it'll be popular - though with the accessibility needs for a public site, probably expensive too. And I can think of some things (e.g. reporting) which might benefit. So I guess, I wouldn't panic about it - Silverlight (like flash) largely seems to be about looking sexy. I'd leave it until it's clear that it is in use in the enterprise - and use the later generation of Silverlight that we'll have by then.

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