ALKHOBAR: Calling all developers in Saudi Arabia! Have you entered the Office Developer of the Year (ODY) 2008 competition being held by Microsoft in Saudi Arabia? The contest is open to developers working in the Kingdom and students and academics living in Saudi Arabia of any nationality, male or female, individuals or teams. All that matters is that you create a great Microsoft Office application or solution and submit it by Sept. 30, 2008. Full details are available at www.microsoft.com/saudi/ody.
The ringleader for ODY 2008 is Microsoft Saudi Arabia’s new Platform Strategy Manager Wayne Meyer. A South African, Meyer has spent the summer in the Kingdom, learning how high the mercury in thermometers can go and encouraging any developer not away on vacation to get creative. The prizes are not insignificant. Students and professionals have separate development tracks to give students a fair chance in the competition and there is a SR30,000 first prize offered for each.
“We kicked off the completion in June and we’ve had a pretty good response. So far we’ve had about 200 developers sign up to compete, across both the education sector as well as the professional sector,” said Meyer. “About half the developers who have signed up for the completion have also joined the Facebook group created to support the event. In addition, we’re offering workshops for the developers to educate them and to give them some idea of how a developer can consider Microsoft Office in new ways. We want local developers to understand what can be done with Office and how to build applications for it. We want to show that a lot more can be done with this particular platform than is being done today.
One goal of ODY 2008 is to enable students to demonstrate their expertise to the commercial sector. Microsoft works very closely with the commercial sector and hopes that this competition with help businesses start to identify talented students as well as the ways in which student created applications can add value to the corporate environment. Microsoft is aiming for local developers to understand its development tools in more detail and to consider Microsoft’s long-term strategies, especially in such areas as Windows Live and open source. All developers participating in the completion have been asked to make their applications open source.
“This is a significant shift for Microsoft,” remarked Meyer. “People say, ‘Microsoft and open source, that’s a complete oxymoron. It just doesn’t seem to fit in the same sentence.’ On the contrary, open source is a development model. It’s not necessarily Windows versus Linux. We’re trying to enlighten developers that if they want to develop open source applications, they can develop open source on Windows or open source on a Microsoft platform. We have a number of open source licensing agreements which have been ratified by the open source community. For detailed information on this topic I would urge everyone to take a look at the resources at www.microsoft.com/opensource.”
Microsoft Saudi Arabia has a database of about 4,500 developers and Meyer believes that this number needs to double. He pointed out that in the United States, creating custom applications is a $50 billion industry. In Saudi Arabia, commercial entities have business requirements as well, and they need applications that are custom built. For the Kingdom, many applications must be Arabized. Applications also need to take some of the nuances of the society into account. Arabization and localization efforts stall without Saudi developers.
“Obviously for Microsoft, we would love to have those developers developing on our platform and using our development tools and our development languages,” said Meyer. “For the competition, at the ODY 2008 site there are ideas for development efforts and some local customer feedback was taken into consideration in putting those ideas out there.”
Efforts have been made to ensure that every talented local developer who wants to participate in the contest will have all the resources needed to succeed. The ODY 2008 site offers downloads of tools and other related documentation, sample applications and online training. Those who join the “Microsoft Office Developer of the Year 2008” Facebook group will be kept informed of training available to empower them in the competition. There are two workshops this week — a physical one in Riyadh on Wednesday and a webinar on Thursday. Both require registration, so sign up online. Remember the deadline for submissions is Sept. 30, 2008 with finalists contacted by Oct. 20.
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