MashZone - what's next?

You might already heard rumors about a new MashZone version. Yes indeed, our developers are currently working hard on finalizing it. Today I got my hands on the first release candidate of all new MashZone 2.0.0. Although we are going to publish later this month I decided to blog about one of the new features today.

Before I explain things I invite you to get yourself an impression of what will be possible:

Yes, that is a screen shot of my current iGoogle page and MashZone resides directly within. The speedometer even updates right after the underlying data source does -- reflecting the most recent figures all the time. So what happened to MashZone? How does it interact with iGoogle?

As you might already know each MashApp is addressed by a URL. And with MashZone 2.0.0 you can deactivate the MashZone branding, i.e. its title bar. So my one speedometer MashApp might look very familiar if opened in MashZone directly. In contrast if the branding is hidden it is just about your content.

So the all new feature is an opt-in -- you may use it for selected MashApps to display them at locations you visit frequently. You activate it by invoking the Share dialog (in case you use the Free Edition, yes MashZone supports user management in Professional Edition).

From here you can copy the MashApp's link -- even specifying more options, like hiding MashZone's branding.

As you can see, you can even deactivate the authentication, if your MashApp should be accessible for anybody -- nobody will ask you for passwords.

To finally embed the URL into iGoogle I utilized the iFrame Gadget. Just add it to your page, paste the MashZone URL into it and stay always updated.

Of course the new URL feature is not only about iGoogle. You can embedd MashApps whereever you want. All you need is a website which is capable of rendering iFrames (and Flash of course). I think this could be interesting for your Intranet pages...

If you are interested in MashZone 2 I encourage you to stay tuned during the next days/weeks as we are going to present more news.

Note: See this post for a list of other articles about MashZone 2.0. You might be also interested to join the ARIS MashZone group at ARIS Community.