Portfolio of Keith ElderQBook
by Keith Elder
About
QBook was started on September 2, 2010 and lasted until shutdown in 2013. It was my brainchild at the time to create an application that took Twitter and Facebook and combined them for company's to leverage in the enterprise. There was nothing like this in the industry at the time.
QBook was written in Silverlight, which is rich internet application framework written by Microsoft. NBC used it to stream the Olympics online one year. QBook leveraged SQL Server, LINQ and WCF.
I chose SilverLight because I wanted to play with the new stack. However, I believe it also lead to the downfall of QBook. SilverLight development fizzled out as everyone moved more to Angular and JavaScript. I believe had I built QBook in a web stack initially it could have potentially spun out into a company like Yammer which later came onto the scene.
Video
Watch a full presentation on QBook and all of its many features.
Features
QBook had many features.
- Full-text search
- Communicator status integration
- Tags
- Tagging individuals
- Threaded posts (tweets or status updates)
Search
Full-text search allowed users to quickly locate or find a team member. SIFT did not exist at the time, only the Roster Search which I had previously built. Users could search for messages, or team members or anything. All of the data in QBook was searchable. Here is an example of searching for a team member.
Clicking on that team member displayed all of their contact information, posts and their status from Microsoft Communicator (chat / screen sharing program prior to skype and or Microsoft Teams).
Usage
Team members used QBook quiet a bit in the early days, but the install complexity of SilverLight kept it's usage down, especially on Macs.
QBook 2.0
An attempt was made to re-write QBook using Angular in 2014 but was never completed.