Spread for SharePoint - Out the Door!

It is a great feeling when you manage a product from concept, through design, development, testing, and the last difficult stages of release!

FarPoint Spread for SharePoint officially released a couple days ago and we are receiving calls from excited customers who are telling us it is exactly what they have been looking for. I couldn't be happier about that!

Let me give you a low-down on the features that Spread for SharePoint provides:

• Bind to SharePoint Lists for full data binding (read/write) experience.
• Integration with SharePoint List View Customizations: column visible, sort, group by, totals, …
• Rich formatting options such as: background color, foreground color, font, border, data alignment, …
• User Dynamic data analysis through the use of conditional formatting and multiple-level filtering.
• Export SharePoint List views to PDF, Excel 97-2003 (XLS), and Excel 2007 XML (XLSX) documents.
• Subscribe web services, external to SharePoint, to SharePoint List Events through the Event Subscription Editor in the Tool Pane. This feature allows SharePoint Lists Events Notifications to be exposed to the outside world for participation in pub-sub scenarios such as ESBs or ISBs. (This is available in the Enterprise Edition only.)
• Extend the Spread for SharePoint web part to create a custom web part to address the needs of a specialized need by taking advantage of the unsealed base class in Spread for SharePoint. (This available in the Enterprise Edition only.)

As you can see from the (*) in the feature list, Spread for SharePoint has been released as two editions: Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition. The Standard Edition is the Spreadsheet web part that binds to SharePoint Lists, and the Enterprise Edition is all of that plus an unsealed base class - for extensibility, and the ability to subscribe web services to SharePoint List events.

I think the functionality of this product is exceptional, but I suppose it is my job to think like that. The spreadsheet capabilities and dynamic data analysis features provide for a very useful SharePoint page component.

However, in my opinion the Event Subscription functionality is the coolest feature offered by this web part. Check out Spread for SharePoint and see what you think!

-Robby