This is an insightful blog by Anders Skjønna . Anders was a
speaker at the European SharePoint Conference 2011.
Why not see if you can expand your knowledge from
reading Anders blog post!
You may have heard of this new cloud service that is
about to become available for us all - IFTTT (pronounced "lift"
without the "l"). It's currently in Beta, but you can use it online
today at ifttt.com. 
IFTTT - stand for "IF This Then That". It works very much like a
simple conditional statement in your average workflow engine, but
it's available of the internet - and it works with a lot of the
common social services and other relevant platforms that you are
already using out there.
So what can you use this for? Let me give you a few
examples:
IF you are posting a message on a social platform (that is
supported - could be Twitter) you can have IFTTT post the same (or
another) message on another channel (could be FaceBook). Or IF you
are tagged on a photo on FaceBook, you can have the photo
downloaded to a folder in your Dropbox. It's these kind of simple -
cross platform - workflows you can easily build, using IFTTT. These
examples are quite simple, but you can imagine an almost unlimited
number of possibilities.
This is an amazing idea! If the people behind IFTTT keep up with
the development in social platforms, and if they are succesful
building ways to integrate to things like SharePoint and/or Office
365, IFTTT will be a very strong player in the future, because of
it's accesibility and simplicity. And it's free - at least for
now!
I have high hopes for this one, as it could eventually be a hub
for social communication as people are starting to embrase it's
capabilities. I can think of a few big companies that could
consider making an early aquisition and strengthen their position
in the social computing marketplace.
Some workflow vendors - like Nintex - are already doing
something similar to IFTTT with Nintex Live, a part of the Nintex
Workflow product suite. But these two are really not comparable in
any other sense. Nintex is a real workflow platform - IFTTT is not!
But it's going to be interesting to see what happens to IFTTT in
the near future…
If you are using SharePoint, IFTTT might already be interesting
today. Even without exploring all the capabilities of IFTTT and
what it can actually do with each different channels it connects
to, I see this a an easy way to get social data into SharePoint.
How? IFTTT enables you - very easily - to send emails with relevant
content (you can actually configure the content of the email) to
any mailadress you define. This means that you can have an email
sent to any mail-enabled folder in your SharePoint environment,
when a given condition is triggered in IFTTT. So you can do things
like having your SharePoint MySite status updated, when your
FaceBook status is updated.
As I would expect IFTTT to keep building new triggers into their
solution, you could imagine a number of highly relevant business
scnearios where SharePoint automatically gets triggered by things
that happen on Facebook, Twitter or one of the other services that
is supported.
I will be following up on IFTTT in the near future, and see what
happens in respect to functionality - and how it can benifit
SharePoint users and business.
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