What started as a business request for a “tickertape” application on the intranet has led us to the verge of implementing laconi.ca in our firm.

What is laconi.ca?

It’s basically a twitter-clone, a “Free and Open Source microblogging platform”, take a look at identi.ca which is a public implementation of laconi.ca.  For us though the laconi.ca application has been implemented on the homepage of the intranet, but the beauty of laconi.ca is you can just as easily use one of the twitter clients that support it (e.g. Thwirl).

At the moment the implementation is just in pilot with one practice group, but I can see word of mouth spreading this virally within the firm, like twitter has spread on the web.

Although I can claim some credit for thinking there was scope for a “corporate twitter” behind the firewall (see my post on Jaiku back in January), I can’t claim the credit for this implementation. Either by being the person to suggest the solution to the request for the “tickertape” application nor for being the team looking after it.

Our application architect saw laconi.ca as the solution and has implemented the application, here are some of the technical details:

laconi.ca is installed on the intranet on IIS/PHP5 utilising ISAPI_Rewrite from Helicon Tech (http://www.isapirewrite.com/), to a MySql 5 Database.

A javascript ajax front end was developed to laconi.ca’s twitter api utilising the jquery framework. All ui updates are via ajax – as it had to be compatible with IE6 🙁

User authentication is performed by NTLM challenge/response and delegated (via javascript header manipulation) to laconi.ca in order to avoid prompting the user for a login.

The javascript/html/css is bundled as a SharePoint content webpart which is displayed on the Firm’s intranet homepage.

Laconi.ca user accounts are kept in sync with AD via a java based ESB (enterprise service bus) message listener.

The application itself looks simple (just like twitter!) and that’s the beauty of it. It just does what it does without any complicated UI to learn.

I really hope it takes off, as I think microblogging will prove to be an invaluable tool for a law firm. I’ll post an update down the line to update on how it goes.