Backstage with Office 2010 website

It seems Intergen is getting a bit of a name for itself around Microsoft Corp as the go-to Silverlight guys.

With only a couple of weeks until the big reveal of the latest version of Office, Microsoft Office 2010, at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in July, Microsoft Corp needed a ‘Backstage’ website with all the bells and whistles, built entirely in Silverlight, inside two weeks.

Ever keen to get their hands on the technology and make ground breaking stuff, our Backstage project team set to work, using every minute available to them to get the job done. James Newton-King, a trusty member of the team, runs through the features of the site.

Backstage is full of videos from the Office 2010 team who go behind the scenes of Office development and talk about what they have been busy working on since 2007.

The main Backstage website is 100% Silverlight and shows off lots of great features, including:

• 100% Silverlight design
• Smooth streaming – videos will scale from HD for awesome broadband
  connections down to speed-optimised resolutions for mobile devices
• Embedded social links to those sites all the cool kids are using (Twitter,
  Facebook, Delicious, Digg, Live)Deep linking directly to videos
• Commenting and rating videos, video view counts

As well as the main site we have created an RSS feed of recently added videos. Not only can you subscribe to it via an RSS reader but the feed also works with iTunes and other video podcast clients.

Finally, visiting mobile users will automatically be redirected to an HTML mobile version of the site, complete with low resolution videos for 3G mobile devices. It looks fantastic on my iPhone.

It was a crazy ride getting everything done in time for the launch but the end result was worth it. Check out Backstage With Office 2010 at office2010themovie.com.

james.newton-king@intergen.co.nz