Kivati Studio: Like Yahoo! Pipes for Sharepoint Apps
There was once an era when website content could only be changed by wrestling time away from someone who specialized in such technical matters. Blogging changed all of that. Applications too, were once the exclusive domain of technical specialists - but a new generation of services is changing that today as well. In the consumer space services like Yahoo! Pipes, Dapper, Feedity now make the creation of simple and composite applications something that a far greater number of power-users can do for themselves.
The enterprise world is now seeing a similar class of tools emerge. We've written here before about services like Kapow and MindTouch. Apatar is another alternative. Now, a new service called Kivati Studio launched this morning that brings easy application development and porting capabilities to the Sharepoint environment.
Technical specialists can today develop any number of applications for Sharepoint and port those apps around to different places in the enterprise. Kivati's graphic user interface aims to make that easy for anyone to do and could save developers themselves a substantial amount of time.
Users can chose between more than 400 different functions, each with multiple properties, to process incoming information and offer new types of functionality for end users. The company says that the end result of using Kivati is a robust Sharepoint script that can be run as an executable in any number of different locations.
For a video demonstration of Kivati, click on the screenshot below.
The development environment is downloaded and run locally. At launch there's a free 7 day demonstration on the company site and an initial price of $600 per user. Regular price after June will be $1k per user.
I really like the idea of a locally stored Pipes-like GUI to build simple executables. Sharepoint may be beside the point for me personally, but something with this kind of functionality and free of the flakiness of so many web applications would be great to have. Many of our readers will likely find this desirable for Sharepoint. If you try out the 7 day free trial of Kivati, let us know how it performs.
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so one of the things you can do with Yahoo Pipes is combined RSS feeds, right? such as - take 2 feeds , pipe them together and in turn have one combined feed
I wish Kivati would have this functionality, but I don't see from their documentation that they offer this. In my organization, we want to be able to combine RSS feeds to simplify adoption.
Neat app, though it really reminds me more of the "Composite App Builder" class of applications, as opposed to things like Pipes / Dapper.
If you're looking to create RSS feeds, widgets, alerts, or do other "Pipes" type stuff, AlchemyGrid is another useful service in this arena.
It's interesting Kivati has a 7-day trial period, considering the depth of it's featureset. Also, is subscription pricing monthly or yearly?
I'm a bit confused:
1. Why is Popfly not mentioned: It's free, it's from MSFT, and it output runs in Sharepoint (AFAIK)?
2. Kivati's price seems to be similar to Visual Studio -- justified?
I'm Jack Nichols, product manager at Kivati Software, and I wanted to offer an answer to the question about RSS feeds, as it's a good one.
Currently, Kivati Studio does not support the RSS scenario as described above unless it is supported in the SharePoint environment (such as by a third party component). One way to enable this would is by using some type of custom code asset - a web part, for example. While Kivati will happily deploy a web part, Kivati can't help you create that web part.
This behavior is a definite design decision — Kivati is not intended to replace the writing of custom workflows, Web parts, etc. because people already have good processes and tools for building these and are comfortable with those scenarios. Kivati Studio is good at making it a whole lot easier to deploy custom code assets that you have built, and also at helping you to deploy a good variety of other SharePoint assets.
It is possible that we may more directly support this scenario in the future, but the primary focus of the current version of Kivati Studio is doing deployment right.
Hopefully that answered your question. If not, please email me and I'll be happy to clarify.
Its good to see some neat mashup tools emerging. My personal favorite for day-to-day feeds is Feedity.com as you have also pointed out. Its easy to use and produces good results. For anything fancy, I use Yahoo Pipes and Feedity together. RSS feeds have changed the way news is delivered, and with these tools combined the content can serve many more purposes.
@Jack, we should talk .. soon. :-) Please ping me at LLiu [at] microsoft.com.
Lawrence Liu
Senior Technical Product Manager for Social Computing (and a few other things)
Microsoft SharePoint
Wow, it's like Yahoo Pipes for Sharepoint? That is so awesome it makes me want to go back into I.T.! (well, almost...)