New Joomla Extensions: Bing Maps, Windows Live ID, OData and Silverlight Pivot Viewer

Four new
Joomla
extensions
are now
available
allowing
customers
that leverage
the CMS to
seamlessly integrate various
Microsoft technologies into
their projects.
The Redmond company provided
Schakra and MindTree with the
necessary funding for them to
put together the following
Joomla extensions: Bing Maps,
Windows Live ID, OData and the
Silverlight Pivot Viewer.
Undoubtedly, some web
developers might already be
familiar with these resources,
although not related to the
Joomla content management
system.
In the second half of January
2011, the launch of Drupal 7 also
brought into the limelight the
interoperability work that
Microsoft poured into making
sure that the open source CMS
would play nice with its
technologies and Cloud platform.
At that time the software giant
announced the availability of four
new Drupal modules, namely
Bing Maps, Windows Live ID,
OData and the Silverlight Pivot
Viewer, which are now also
offered to those taking
advantage of Joomla.
I myself find Joomla a tad
friendlier than Drupal, and I tend
to prefer it, so I welcome the fact
that the extensions mentioned
above have been tailored to both
content management systems.
Gianugo Rabellino, Senior
Director of Open Source
Communities for Microsoft
provided a quick overview of the
extensions:
"Bing Maps extension (http://
joomlacode.org/gf/project/
bingmaps/ ):
With this extension, Joomla!
users can easily include
customized Bing Maps into the
content they are publishing, and
administrator can preconfigure
how the map should look, and
where it can be added
Silverlight Pivot viewer
extension (http://
joomlacode.org/gf/project/
pivotviewer/ ):
With this extension Joomla! users
can visually navigate with the
Silverlight Pivot viewer through
large amount of data.
Administrators define what is the
data source using a set of
preconfigured options like OData,
RSS, media files, etc, .
Windows Live ID extensions
(http://joomlacode.org/gf/
project/windowsliveid/):
With this extension Joomla! users
can associate their Joomla!
account to their Windows Live ID,
and then to login on Joomla!
with Windows Live ID.
OData extension (http://
joomlacode.org/gf/project/
odata/ ):
With this extension Joomla!
administrator can provide users
with quick access to any OData
source, like the Netflix catalog
(check the list of live OData
services), and let them include
these in any content type (such
as articles). The generic
extension includes a basic OData
query builder and renders data
in a simple HTML