Hi! My name is Kevin Kennedy and I’m doing a guest spot on Tim Huckaby’s blog. I’m a Senior Software Engineer here at InterKnowlogy and I was the dev lead on the app we created for the Peter Kuhn lab at The Scripps Research Institute. They are doing very cool research on cancer and SARS (among many other projects) and they needed a way to share and collaborate around various 2D and 3D assets relevant to their work. To meet that need, we created a WPF smart client application that leveraged a SharePoint back end to enable rich interaction among the members of their group. See the media coverage here: http://www.interknowlogy.com/IKCorporate/News/Headlines/The+Scripps+Research+Institute+CME+Application+and+the+3D+Collaborator+for+AutoCad+Drawings+Applicat.htm 

Near the end of last year, we engaged an international community team with the help of Eileen Rumwell at Microsoft. Included in the group were Szymon Kobalczyk (Poland), Rania Gamal (Egypt), and Haaron Gonzalez (Mexico). All of these developers far exceeded our expectations. This was my first experience interacting with a remote team comprised of this many people from this many different locations. Everyone did a good job communicating despite the challenge presented by the differences in time zones. Despite some other people’s opinions to the contrary, I was very impressed with TFS. Any additional overhead was far outweighed by the increases in productivity, especially in a distributed environment such as this. 

Some of the cool stuff the community developers added were three dimensional annotation markers, Office 2007 document preview, integrated SharePoint discussions, advanced authentication scenarios, and a tabbed user interface. Finally, I know it’s cliché, but it really does feel good to know that you’re helping such a worthy cause. I’m confident all the members of team would echo this sentiment.