Microsoft’s product engineering team has partnered with event content technology startup Hubb to create a cross-platform app for Microsoft’s Business Support University. The event brings the company’s businesses administrators together to discuss best practices.
Connecting to Hubb’s current platform, the app allows for participant registration and content management to enable efficient planning and administration.
Building the App
Hubb’s engineering team worked with Microsoft for four months to build an app that works seamlessly cross-platform. They used Visual Studio tools for Apache Corvada to get there, utilizing work item tracking and agile planning.
“Our partnership with Microsoft was a seamless experience—the team was very responsive and acted quickly on any updates and fixes throughout the co-development process,” said Josh Vande Krol, COO of Hubb. “Having the Microsoft developers adopt our release methodology and work in our environment challenged our existing best practices and motivated us towards continued product improvements through top tier technology that we can continue to implement in future integrations.”
App Usage During Business Support Univeristy
Microsoft hosted the back-end of the app on Azure and launched it on May 3, 2016. The software proved invaluable for recording descriptions, types, times and locations for the 42 sessions at the event.
“Working closely with the Hubb engineering team was an excellent experience for us and I think both sides learned a lot from the co-development process,” said Peter Hauge, senior software engineer at Microsoft. “Hubb’s integration-friendly technology and back-end combined with our mobile app expertise helped us create a robust solution that integrated with the event’s existing registration site and enhanced the event attendees’ experience on-site.”
Hub captured information from 538 attendees, allowing them to discover session data and interact with the talk in real time. The result of the collaboration was a technology-enhanced conference which the audience considered a big success.
