X-Team is a company focused on people.

So in 2013, we built some new foundational infrastructure focused on people, who they work with, and what they work on.

This new infrastructure provides a directory services database to centralise all people, teams and projects in the one place. At the core is an open source LDAP-compatible directory server, on top of which we built a HTTP API that speaks JSON, CSV, & XML, and understands browser cookies and CORS. All of this allows us to build apps so we can connect and collaborate in new ways.

To launch our new infrastructure, we created a contest inviting X-Teamers to build an app which utilises directory services, either directly over LDAP or via the HTTP API.

Given the crunch we had with client work over the holiday season we only had nine entries and only two entries managed to launch by the deadline. But both of them are outstanding and we’re very excited to share them with the world.

We’re happy to announce the winners here!

The most creative – ‘Lightning’ by Artur Kot

Artur created a fun app that plots staff locations on a rotating 3D world map using THREE.js, and the “work location” data from the HTTP API. As a bonus, as each person’s location comes up on the rotating globe, a tone created from their name is played (in browsers that support the Web Audio API, specifically AudioContext.createOscillator)

The best technical integration – ‘X-Skills’ by Tiago Nunes and Manuel Silva

[Digital Eggnog X-Skills

Tiago and Manuel focused on solving a real-world challenge: easily identifying X-Teamers by skill. They executed this idea in a simple Node.JS/MongoDB app, matching up user data from the HTTP API, with previously collected user skills data.

Congratulations Artur, Tiago and Manuel!