Leveraging the web

Leveraging the Web as an ISV

Whether you're an ISV building desktop applications or web applications for your customers or you're a software-as-a-service provider (SaaS), it is important to fully understand the different opportunities that you take advantage of as an ISV.

First and foremost, the web is the ultimate sales and marketing platform for your applications. It allows you to reach out to millions of potential customers and is not limited to geographical boundaries. However, with this global and massive reach comes an equally important competitive landscape. It is therefore important that your message and application stand out by providing an immersive and compelling user experience to your site visitors. With Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) you have a browser that gives you the beauty of the web by putting the site content out in front. By taking advantage of features such as site pinning, jump lists and notifications, you add more interactivity for your users and have your website behave as an application. In addition, with the hardware acceleration features built into IE9, you can create rich web applications that are snappy and responsive by taking advantage of the processing power of the PC.

When you're using the web, you want to reach as many users as possible. HTML5 is the next major update to the W3C HTML specification, providing a standard structure for presenting content on the web. The specification adds new features such as graphical support, plus multimedia support like inline video and audio, as well as new APIs to make it easier for developers to create rich, interactive web applications.

From an application platform point of view, there are several options to leverage the Web:

• You can implement all functionality as a website. This approach greatly simplifies application deployment and ease of access, because it only requires the end-user to have a web browser and network connectivity. By using technologies such as Silverlight or HTML5, you can still provide a rich, immersive and interactive user experience.
• Similar to the first approach, if you already have a desktop application, you can create a web application to extend the desktop application, for example to accommodate remote or mobile workers. This web application could implement a subset of the core functionality or add new mobile work scenarios to the application.
• A third option is to augment your desktop application with capabilities provided by web services. These web services may take the form of graphical components, such as geographical mapping functions (e.g. Bing Maps) or instant messaging capabilities (e.g. Live Messenger); alternatively these web services can provide non-interactive capabilities (e.g. Bing Translator, Bing Search, etc.). By incorporating these services, you can add business value to your application without the need to implement such functionality entirely yourself. For example, if you're developing an application targeted at insurance agents, you could embed mapping functionality inside the application to link the exact location for an insurance claim, and for example, also provide information about nearby repair shops.

In the following sections, depending on the amount of time you have, we'll provide you information on Microsoft's web technology stack.