In our efforts to make the most of our intranet, and the SharePoint intranets projects we deliver, I'm developing a Silverlight based, Office Map webpart. I like to think of it as a Google Maps, or Virtual Earth, for the enterprise cubicles.
It's fairly simple stuff right now, I'm querying contact information from the MOSS User Profiles store and I'm displaying it associated to a x,y pair of coordinates on top of an office map image, Silverlight is just perfect for this kind of stuff. Profiles positioning is a drag and drop task carried out by and admin.
This is what it looks like now,
Some scenarios I think a tool like this could come in handy are:
- Mapping names to faces, and viceversa (what was the name again of the new guy seated over there?)
- Geo querying workmates basic contact information (phone, email, mobile)
- Locating resources, printers, shredders in the office (ok, I've just sent ten copies to HP LaserJet 3320, now where the heck is that printer?)
- Management Office space, and seat assignment planning. Designing and sharing possible seat layouts.
- Communicating seat assignments highlighting only those who've been moved
It'd be cool to integrate it to a map provider like Virtual Earth, zooming in from the world map to the office building, into the seat map.