Silverlight Process Designer in SharePoint WSS - Development of a Silverlight 2.0 Process Designer tool with integration in SharePoint WSS

Abstract

SharePoint WSS is an information portal from Microsoft. It helps employees communicate and collaborate within the company. SharePoint lets people share documents and files by storing them in a central site making cooperation within the company trouble-free. Silverlight is a technology for building Rich Internet Applications. It uses a browser plug-in that downloads and executes Silverlight code within the browser. It is designed to offer the user a richer experience than the traditional mixture of HTML and scripting languages. The Process Designer tool brings these two technologies together. Completely developed in Silverlight the Process Designer tool takes advantage of out-of-the-box functionality of SharePoint WSS. In conjunction the Silverlight tool brings a visual user experience to SharePoint that the technology itself cannot accomplish. Following a couple of integration steps Silverlight can be used within SharePoint. By using Web Service technology communication between the two frameworks is established making them benefit from each other. The focus of the thesis is the integration of Silverlight in SharePoint WSS, evaluating the process and the Silverlight technology. Integration and implementation issues will be outlined that helps development of future Silverlight applications.