SP Marketplace, which launched about one and a half years ago as a community app store, has built out a suite of business services and applications to empower small businesses to get more out of their SharePoint deployments without having to spend money for SharePoint services.
“What Microsoft Office 365 does for office automation, we do for core business-process automation,” said Darrell Trimble, CEO of SP Marketplace.
The suite, for SharePoint on-premise or SharePoint Online, includes templates for service desks or department resources such as schedules, and then can be used to create self-service forms such as vacation requests or expense reimbursements. Later, full-blown apps such as CRM or even an intranet portal can be built on top, Trimble said.
There also is branding via Bind Tuning, he explained. “We call this app provisioning,” he said. “You can pick the Web Parts you want in the intranet, choose from 20+ templates for branding, and you’ve got a solution. There’s been nothing that’s been a real configurable solution.”
Through an earlier announced partnership with Layer 2, back-office integration is made possible to handle data from forms and invoices, Trimble said.
SP Marketplace still is bringing in a lot of applications; the site is working with OnePlace for mail, and will be engaging with document-management companies for handling forms. In late November, the company introduced a human resources application for Office 365 and SharePoint that can run as a standalone app or as part of the business suite. Among its features are employee self-service, service-request tracking, hiring process management, time-off management, performance-review management, and simple benefits tracking.
Looking ahead, project tracking on what Trimble called more of a single site level that can track many projects through an account “superview” is planned.
Trimble added that next month, the company will introduce vertical solutions. Among the first is CRM for local governments. “This becomes a citizen request system,” he said. And version 3.0, scheduled for a spring 2013 release, will bring in a social aspect to the suite, he said.
