Yes, that's right! The iPhone meets SharePoint. Very soon we at IDV Solutions will be launching Visual Fusion Contribute, a first-of-its-kind mobile collaboration and contribution tool. We are smitten by the location-based capabilities of the iPhone, and set out to develop an application that would allow our enterprise customers to submit geotagged notes and photos from their iPhone directly into a Visual Fusion-enabled SharePoint Library. Using Visual Fusion, our enterprise mashup platform for SharePoint, organizations will then be able to share out those submissions in a mashup of their own creation, or syndicate out the contributions via GeoRSS, KML, or GML (all of which are supported in Visual Fusion) into their favorite map viewer.

The net of it is that employees in the field are empowered to make valuable, location-relevant contributions. A few examples of how Visual Fusion Contribute can be utilized:

• An emergency operations center (EOC) can combine, in Visual Fusion, feet-on-the-street Contribute photos with other pertinent law enforcement feeds, public map data, and current traffic to gain a better common operational picture (COP), all within a robust SharePoint environment.
• A field crew inspecting a pipeline in Alaska can post geotagged pictures of potential trouble spots back to the enterprise portal
• Event security at a large sports venue can gain situational awareness by visualizing, on a Virtual Earth map, geo-relevant photos & notes submitted by security personnel
• A Fortune 500 company can use Visual Fusion Contribute to help track the safety and whereabouts of top executives, within the security of their enterprise portal framework
• Using Visual Fusion with SharePoint Search, a project team can search by project keywords and location for geo-relevant photos and notes

Empowering employees to contribute business content from their mobile devices is a powerful enabler, and I'm sure the usage examples I name above are just the tip of the iceberg. I look forward to hearing how our customers utilize Contribute.

If you'd like additional information on Visual Fusion Contribute, or would like to see a pre-release demonstration, please contact us.