SergeyS's blog

Sorry, I did not work with MS OfficeLive documents yet. But, nevertheless, I think the idea could be of some interest.

All these billions of ubiquitous sensors around us doing their routine everyday work. Why not let them log their data directly to SQL server database that backs up MS OfficeLive documents?

For example if I had a number of temperature and other types of sensors around my home, I’d like to store it somehow and process and represent the result in convenient way. Normally I should buy some hardware to connect the sensors to PC, develop some software to acquire the data and store it into MS Access or Excel, then somehow process it and show the result. Too much hassle.
Why not buy some hub that would talk to SQL server database under MS OfficeLive and then simply connect standard sensors to the hub?

For home use the hub could be
- a cheap microcontroller (US$3) should be powerful enough to consume web services.
- a GPRS or CDMA module (US$15) with internet plan (US$10/month)
- some interface logic (US$1)
 
The MS OfficeLive documents should be real live. The incoming data should get processed and displayed real-time.

Professional usage also is interesting. A lot of applications are not starting because of initial or pilot phase costs much time and money. If you have a distributed system to acquire data, the cost of hardware (and knowledge how to choose right one) to gather the data together would cost good money and time. With the proposed approach you just buy cheap hub, connect sensors to it and all you data are getting to the database automatically, hundreds of thousands bucks are saved. Of course you could optimize hardware later; the good thing is that you can start developing business software right now over live data.

The range of applications that could talk to MS OfficeLive web-hosts/datacenters through web-services is big, from small home projects to large corporate. The next step would be to sell basic business software on datacenters over the proposed scheme; and also to let developers to customize the functionality using .NET.  Definitely I’d prefer the live docs to Google docs.

---

Published under the relevent terms.