14 DAY TRIAL // Four new Joomla extensions are now available allowing customers that leverage the CMS to seamlessly integrate various Microsoft technologies into their projects.
The Redmond company provided Schakra and MindTree with the necessary funding for them to put together the following Joomla extensions: Bing Maps, Windows Live ID, OData and the Silverlight Pivot Viewer.
Undoubtedly, some web developers might already be familiar with these resources, although not related to the Joomla content management system.
In the second half of January 2011, the launch of Drupal 7 also brought into the limelight the interoperability work that Microsoft poured into making sure that the open source CMS would play nice with its technologies and Cloud platform.
At that time the software giant announced the availability of four new Drupal modules, namely Bing Maps, Windows Live ID, OData and the Silverlight Pivot Viewer, which are now also offered to those taking advantage of Joomla.
I myself find Joomla a tad friendlier than Drupal, and I tend to prefer it, so I welcome the fact that the extensions mentioned above have been tailored to both content management systems.
Gianugo Rabellino, Senior Director of Open Source Communities for Microsoft provided a quick overview of the extensions:
"Bing Maps extension (http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/bingmaps/):
With this extension, Joomla! users can easily include customized Bing Maps into the content they are publishing, and administrator can preconfigure how the map should look, and where it can be added
Silverlight Pivot viewer extension (http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/pivotviewer/):
With this extension Joomla! users can visually navigate with the Silverlight Pivot viewer through large amount of data. Administrators define what is the data source using a set of preconfigured options like OData, RSS, media files, etc, .
Windows Live ID extensions(http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/windowsliveid/): With this extension Joomla! users can associate their Joomla! account to their Windows Live ID, and then to login on Joomla! with Windows Live ID.
OData extension (http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/odata/):
With this extension Joomla! administrator can provide users with quick access to any OData source, like the Netflix catalog (check the list of live OData services), and let them include these in any content type (such as articles). The generic extension includes a basic OData query builder and renders data in a simple HTML Table."