A new release of StreamWork came out last weekend. If you look at the press release, you'll see that the main focus was the integration of GoogleDocs and the new "People-related" functionality.
A Twitter message, however, alerted me that an even bigger change had occured - support for OpenSocial was now available via a new StreamWork API.
This change means that it is much easier to embed external content in StreamWork. In addition, this embedding of external content is based on a standard. There are an amazing number of existing OpenSocial Gadgets that can now be emdedded in StreamWork activitities.
Why is the new functionality important? Let's say that you are working on a decision in StreamWork that concerns the acquisition of a new company. With the ability to embed OpenSocial Gadgets, you can now add such content as an RSS feed of currents news about the acquisition target, a stock market ticket measuring the share price of that company, its twitter feed, etc. All in the one activity. This additional information should allow you to make a better decision. Furthermore, you could save this activity with its OpenSocial gadgets as a template so that future acquisition decisions could be set up more quickly.
Although I haven't tried yet, I'm assuming that StreamWork organizations can restrict access to certain gadgets to prevent users from adding potentially harmful or non-work related gadgets
As my video demonstrates there are a variety of consumer-oriented OpenSocial Gadgets already available. There are fewer OpenSocial Gadgets that focus more on the enterprise. Imagine, however, what will happen when you can create a OpenSocial Gadget in River that you can drop in StreamWork or BusinessByDesign (by the way, I have no idea if ByD has this functionality on its Road-map but it is definitely an important feature). Rapid integration across both Core and Edge OnDemand applications. Now that would be cool.
