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SMS Management & Technology (SMS) recently hosted an internal competition in the interest of promoting creativity and giving staff the chance to use of the latest Microsoft technology. Entitled the ‘SMS Blue Sky Challenge (powered by Microsoft Azure), the competition focused on the theme of putting ideas to action, and gave SMSers the tools and incentive to build prototype mobile applications designed to address compelling business challenges.

Prizes on offer included (for the winning team captain) a trip to the Microsoft //BUILD/ Conference in North America and Windows Phone 7 handsets for the remaining two entrants. The runners up won Microsoft X-Box Kinect bundles and all successful entrants received Gold Class movie tickets.

SMS received 16 entries to the competition and 13 ultimately made their way to the final assessment stages.

We had some great ideas put forward. Ideas included a timesheet entry app, a “locate SMSer” app, a “central meeting point” app and a “coffee culture” app, amongst others.

The winning teams idea was to automate the process for a Client to request assistance from SMS through what they called the Client to Consultant’ (or C2C) app.

‘The interactive way of picking the right consultant for your project and resourcing requirements’

C2C is an integrated system that provides a consolidated view of SMS’s consultants, their capabilities and availability. It is designed to provide a streamlined overview of SMS Consultant information to address the needs of SMS Consultants, Management and Existing/Potential Clients. This is achieved through providing aggregated views of existing consultant information at differing levels of granularity.

We were overwhelmed by the quality of the entries submitted, and the effort that the teams went to in order to deliver their concepts.

Stay tuned for our next blog entry to hear about winning captain Darko Zoroja’s trip to the Microsoft //BUILD/ Conference.

Posted November 17th, 2011
categories: Blog