Windows Vista + Office 2007 + Virtual Earth = Cool!!!

I've been working with Accruent, a Microsoft Gold Partner, as they migrate to their next generation of Real Estate Management System.  Sanjay Parthasarthy, who heads up all things evangelism, invited me to demo the really cool work they've done during his keynote at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in July.  In this demo, I step through various parts of the app showing how Accruent takes advantage of various pieces of the Microsoft stack to its full advantage.  

I start off in Office on the client, in this case Word, showing how they pull line of business info down to the desktop to help individual information workers be more productive.  (starts at: 0:50)

I then move to the server where they use SharePoint and Excel Web Services as the infrastructure on which they build their dashbaords for team collaboration around individual stores.  It's here that they use Virtual Earth and Windows Live Local to build a mashup showing geospatial data that would have been a hard-to-grok list on a web site.  Cool! (starts at:  2:49)

The grand finale comes where we move to an jaw-dropping, eye-popping 3D view of customer data.  I won't spoil the ending by trying to describe it but it's defintely worth watching.  (starts at:  8:00)

Have a look and let me know what you think.

 

P.S.

By the way, Jason Suess interviewed the team from Accruent that worked on this project.  That video is also up on Channel 9.