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PR03198 8 Jan 2004
Microsoft Unites Young Technology Enthusiasts with New Student Community Websites – as well as a Create-Your-Own Community Development Kit
London - January 7th 2004 - Microsoft has designed and launched a new community site for the young technology enthusiast, called theSpoke.net, as part of its support of university students and other young people interested in technology. It has also helped to promote Project Hurricane, which is a student community site and free resource for students to build their own online portals and communities. Both initiatives are complementary and are a core part of Microsoft’s overall aim to encourage the growth of student communities built around Microsoft technology.
Designed to enable students to connect with their tech-savvy peers, theSpoke.net facilitates and encourages the development and sharing of ideas, and serves as a global information hub for aspiring developers, as well as those interested in all areas of technology to support their studies and help them realise their potential.
Project Hurricane is a wholly independent student community portal and software development kit (SDK), built by students for students. Dominic Hopton at The University of Cardiff, Mark Johnston at Queens University Belfast, and Corey Gouker at UMIST built and designed the Project Hurricane portal and SDK, which enables students to quickly and easily build online portals and communities for student societies or indeed communities of any type.
The launches of theSpoke.net and Project Hurricane follow several Microsoft academic initiatives already underway this year to support the student community, particularly university students on computer-science-related courses. The Imagine Cup, Microsoft’s annual worldwide student programming competition, kicked off in October to seek out this year’s brightest and most creative young developers, while a lecture series (100% Inspiration Tour) is also doing the rounds of Universities nationwide covering a range of topics to boost interest and knowledge to support technology-based courses.
Dr Stuart Nielsen-Marsh, Group Manager of the Microsoft Academic Programme at Microsoft Ltd, said: “With the availability of these two online communities, Microsoft is acknowledging that the needs of modern education go beyond the lecture room and that young people can learn much from each other. We realise, as has happened with Project Hurricane, the importance of enabling the students’ ideas drive projects like these in order to make them successful.”
Built on ASP.NET, Project Hurricane includes a whole host of interactive features such as blogging as well as features which enable easy customisation of your own student portal. It also has online forums for users to talk about anything and everything. There are areas for articles and resources to post interesting community-related information.
Setting up a site powered by Project Hurricane will require a tech-savvy administrator to get it up and running, but Project Hurricane also has a wealth of information, articles, updates, design templates and downloads that allow such an administrator to get information and files to easily personalise and make their site a huge success.
Project Hurricane has been adopted as the platform of choice by new communities worldwide, with its influence seeing it power the Passion portal run by a group students at UCLA in the United States as well as Academic Longhorn, a student community run by the Edmonton .NET Wizards focused around the next generation Windows desktop platform. Student clubs and societies from universities and colleges across the United Kingdom have also been developing their respective sites on Project Hurricane.
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