Giant Slalom

Firm teams with Microsoft, USOC for virtual press room at Olympic Games

Did you catch any of the press coverage of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games from Vancouver? Of course you did. You probably didn’t know Slalom Consulting helped bring it to you, but they had a little help.

The Seattle-based business and IT consulting firm teamed with Microsoft and the U.S. Olympic Committee to launch a Virtual Press Room Built Entirely on Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight technology.

Microsoft SharePoint is the business collaboration platform for the Enterprise and the Web. Silverlight is a web browser plug-in that works with Windows and Mac operating systems, as well as all major web browsers.

The USOC’s Virtual Press Room improved USOC communication capabilities by providing journalists with a wealth of athlete information—from news sections to article lists. In addition, live Twitter feeds from the USOC and Team USA athletes helped give real-time views—often updated every few minutes—into ongoing Olympic events and stories.

“The Virtual Press Room is a terrific example of how Microsoft platforms can integrate social with traditional content for a new kind of media experience,” said Jerry Kaczmarowski, general manager for Slalom Consulting. “It’s rewarding to couple [our proficiency with Microsoft technologies] with our social media and web site development knowledge to produce an easy-to-use resource for the National Governing Bodies uploading content to the site, and for media covering the Olympics.”

The new generation of Pressbox is one element of the USOC’s digital media strategy designed to motivate Olympic fans to engage in the Olympic movement online,” says Trevor Miller, USOC managing director of information technology. The site helped capture “the power of new media technologies and audiences to enable journalists to bring the best stories of Team USA to Americans.”

Meanwhile, in other Slalom news, recently announced that it had leveraged the cloud to deploy its SharePoint 2010 practice to nearly a thousand consultants across nine U.S. offices. To launch its SharePoint 2010 practice, Slalom Consulting built a ‘private cloud’ from Skytap that could rapidly scale, enable self-service provisioning of data center resources, and provide team communication between offices.

Within a week, Slalom rolled out Skytap accounts to its entire SharePoint 2010 practice team members, and the company has achieved a 60 percent total cost of ownership reduction compared to running the practice on its internal infrastructure, and the collaboration between its nine U.S. consulting offices has been significantly improved, according to Slalom officials.

Source: Consulting Magazine.