About 40% of the Swiss users are already using the Silverlight browserplugin. For this reason, Microsoft Switzerland has launched, in close cooperation with Best of Swiss Web (BoSW), the Best of Swiss Silverlight Award. Claudio Dionisio, president of the BoSW Association, awarded the most innovative, exciting and businessrelevant Silverlight solutions at the Shape - The Web Conference.

The projects were judged by a competent jury, chaired by Prof. Dr. Markus Stolze from the Institute für Software at the Hochschule für Technik in Rapperswil. The jury members especially focused on aspects such as technical innovation and unconventional design. Furthermore, great emphasis was placed on stability, usability and business relevance of the submitted solutions.

From the pool of the submitted projects, the jury awarded the following four solutions with Gold-, Silver- and Bronze- Awards. And the awards go to:

1th Place - sobees web
2nd Place - B2B-Connector - E-Commerce Platform Swiss Post
2nd Place - Medical Cockpit
3rd Place - Energy Saving Calculator (Interaktives Sales Tool)

Best of Swiss Silverlight - Gold Award

Project: sobees web
Customer: sobees Ltd.
Contractor: sobees Ltd.

sobees web is an elegant, Silverlight 3 based web application merging content from Twitter, Facebook and Real Time Search (Twitter and Friendfeed search). It provides various configuration options to fully support usage of these social communities. The new version, planned for mid-November, will introduce further, still un-disclosed, features. Stay tuned.



sobees web stands out with its high level of innovation and the elegant, functional user interface. The solution, based on Silverlight 3, integrates sophisticated animations with an intuitive handling. sobees web uses the latest features of Silverlight 3 - including the possibility to run in the "Out-of-browser" mode as an offline desktop application. To complete the solution, it uses the Windows Azure "platform-as-a-service"to store information.

"Since the beginning of sobees, our plan was clearly to deliver the best applications interacting with social networks and offering the best user experience, both on the desktop and on the web. For us, WPF for the desktop and Silverlight for the web (and SL mobile in the future) represent the best technologies to transform our vision into reality."
Vincent RITHNER, CTO, sobees.com

Best of Swiss Silverlight - Silver Award

Project: B2B-Connector - E-Commerce Platform
Customer: Die Schweizerische Post, Poststellen und Verkauf
Contractor: Die Schweizerische Post, IT

The B2B-Connector is a Silverlight based solution to manage the "After-Sales" processes of the electronic and physical sale channels of the Swiss Post (e-shops and sales at all Swiss post offices).

The B2B-Connector proofs ideally how Silverlight can be used for the realization of the latest generation Intranet "Line of Business" applications. Powerful and user-friendly Input-interface allows to combine complex data processing with the deployment-benefits of web applications.

"At the very start of project our customers expressed very clearly, which were the needs the solution to be developed had to fulfill: multitenant, high accessibility, higher user-experience (usability/ease-of-use), no deploy. The challenge was to combine such customer needs to the technical requirements defined by the existing applications and data-structures: complex data representation (sales-related information, customer information, processes status, use of graphics), combination of different screens at a time (parallel processing of user-tasks), asynchronous data access. Those are the reasons why we came up with the idea of Silverlight."
Paolo Casella, SW Architect, Informationstechnologie - Die Schweizerische Post

Best of Swiss Silverlight - Silver Award

Project: Medical Cockpit
Customer: Solothurner Spitäler AG
Contractor: afca informatik ag

Mecidal Cockpit is an integrated system for doctors in the hospital environment. It provides medical staff with a context-sensitive and integrated view on all relevant patient information.

Medical Cockpit is a complex, in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, embedded solution. It combines different sources to efficiently collect and display the data which is needed in the complex medical workflow. The solution excels with a clear, intuitive design and the economic values for the hospitals.

"Silverlight enables us to develop with less complexity modern, attractive and stable user interfaces. The technology supports smooth collaboration between developers and designers, and integrates well to Service Oriented Architecture. "
Paul Affentranger, Geschäftsführer, afca informatik ag

Best of Swiss Silverlight -Bronze Award

Project: Energy Saving Calculator (Interaktives Sales Tool)
Customer: Siemens Schweiz AG
Contractor: Unic AG

This application supports the consultants of Siemens Building Technologies Division in the optimization of energy efficiency in buildings. Their customers - building owners and operators - achieve long-term cost and sustainable CO2 emission reductions.

The simple and well designed application shows perfectly how Silverlight may be used to build intuitive and user-friendly applications and thus optimize processes and data management.

"With the new interactive and intuitive Silverlight solution we gain substantial benefits and savings in our customer service."
Bernardo Egli, Marketing Communication Manager, Siemens Schweiz AG, Building Technologies Division

"The extensive basic features of Silverlight allowed us to develop efficiently our user-friendly sales tool for Siemens Switzerland AG."
André Schmid, Director Sales and Consulting Microsoft, Unic AG

Jury

• Prof. Dr. Markus Stolze
  Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil (Jury-President)
• Patrick Comboeuf
  Director E-Business, SBB CFF FFS
• Luzia Hafen
  Manager User eXperience & Lead Accessibility, ELCA
• Michael Juhasz
  CEO Assai Dialog + Digital, Mitglied der Wirz Gruppenleitung
• Simon Wirth
  Central Marketing Group Lead, Microsoft Switzerland
• Stefano Mallè
  Platform Strategy Advisor, Microsoft Switzerland
• Ronnie Sauremann
  Sr. Architect Evangelist, Microsoft Switzerland