Recently, the Aditi Litehouse team participated in a two-day intensive training at Microsoft headquarters in Seattle, learning more about one of Microsoft’s most recently deployed projects, (codename) Project Siena. At its heart, Project Siena is a Windows 8.1 native application — still in beta mode — providing a visuals-based, incredibly user-friendly platform for developing light Windows applications generally geared towards small businesses. The workshop was run extremely well both days, revealing the incredible number of situations where Siena might serve to make life easier with its beautiful, easy to use interface while preserving functionality of your app-in-development.

The first day primarily served as an interactive learning session, giving Aditi Litehouse members the chance to play around with the development tool through lab exercises, all the while thinking of target markets and niche use cases. Vijay Mital, a GM at Microsoft whose focus is Project Siena development, participated in a brainstorm session regarding the future of Siena, discussing the rapid development, rapid disposal model that the platform was built to achieve, and navigating the team through the impressive Excel support of Siena, among support for other databases including Azure mobile web services, Bing Search, and Bing Translation, making developing applications much more dynamic.

In contrast, the second day catered to the interests of the Litehouse employees more directly, facilitating a brainstorm session for team members to discuss factory-level ideas for Siena platform applications. The app ideas not only flowed by the dozen, from digital campaign planners to employee performance reviewers to travel planners, but also demonstrated extremely practical use cases complemented by incredibly short development timelines.

Litehouse’s UX architect and resident design guru Jatin Shah developed an idea for finding parking easily within the Microsoft campus, an idea that came about while attempting to find parking before the first day of the workshop.

The idea consisted of determining the coordinates of parking lots based on the users location within the Microsoft campus, and providing the user with directions to the lot nearest to their location. The application boasted an impressive use case, solving the issue of finding parking not only throughout the Microsoft campus but generally applying to other campuses as well. What was more impressive was that a fully functioning app solving a common consumer problem was built in the Siena environment in a matter of hours.

At the end of the two days, the Litehouse team truly felt that thousands of consumers and small business owners could develop wholly-fledged applications that could make business tasks — from employee assignments to helping consumers select products — significantly easier. The landscape truly seems limitless; it’s a matter of where a Siena user’s imagination might end.

The entire team would like to thank Posh consultant Walt Ritscher for running the workshop so effectively and getting everyone excited about the app, and Microsoft Marketing manager Jeffrey Shomper for organizing the entire experience. It was incredible to be a part of the early stages of deployment and testing of the project, and we hope to be further involved in Siena’s development, and its eventual success, in the future.