For long time readers you may think by reading the title that I a doing a “best of” edition already in the short life of this blog. But, you would be wrong. Yes, the  very first Developer Spotlight that we did back in September 09 highlighted the folks at Wave.TO. The fact is, they have earned the honour once again…and in a big way.

First, I just want to say that there was a lot of developers to choose from this month. My sentimental favourite was the MindWave gadget because it works with a 3rd party application that I use on my laptop seamlessly and that, for me ,is a huge, huge step in the right direction for Google Wave extensions. Plus, Mashable has a big developer contest going on, so some really excellent extensions are being released for the competition.

I don’t know if the Wave.TO folks are entering or have entered the contest. But, if they haven’t, they should. Because in my mind they have the hands down winner!

The Robot that I want to bring to your attention is called Mr. Ray. Below is a video describing the problem Mr. Ray is trying to solve, the Wave.TO description of the robot and a video of Mr. Ray in action:

Mr-Ray provides a way to include non Google Wave users in a Wave. When a Wave changes an e-mail is dispatched to all e-mail participants with a link. When they follow this link they can view the Wave and interact with it. It’s almost as good as having a Wave account! To get stuck in use the extension installer and select “New Wave with e-mail participants” from the New Wave menu or add mr-ray@appspot.com. To give Mr-Ray a go you can use the sample wave or if you’re not sure what to do and want to see it in action watch the following video…

So you have to agree these folks have done a great job at designing something that the whole Google Corp couldn’t do (or at least, haven’t done up to this point). Integrate Google Wave with Email (GMail). Now perhaps Google is working on something much more elegant. We have to wait and see. Perhaps they will just buy the Wave.TO folks…that would be a good start if they are not working on something else.

Regardless, this excellent work by Wave.TO earns them the March Developer Spotlight honours, and this month that has a little extra meaning, as the competition is extremely stiff. Great job by the great developers over at Wave.TO. Keep up the good work….even if  you become the next Google purchase (they are kind of in that mode lately).

Have you been using Mr. Ray? Let us know how it worked for you. Leave a comment below. Also, visit the folks at Wave.TO and leave a comment on their site and show your support for their great efforts.

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Next weekend I will be presenting Google Wave to the Project Management Institute of Ottawa Valley Outaouais Chapter. If you are in the Ottawa area and are interested in Project Management or your a member of the PMI OVOC and want to earn some PDU’s, please visit the website and register for the event. I hope to meet many Project Management and Google Wave enthusiasts next weekend.

If you are wondering what Google Wave brings to the Project Management world you may want to first start by reading a Wave that has been ongoing now for quite a while (I have been following & contributing to it for at least the last 6 weeks) titled Google Wave for Project Management.

The wish list from the PM’s in this Wave has been summed up to include:

Gmail integration or at least notification (with potential to notify outside Gmail confines)

Gmail style Labels instead of folders or private tags.

Calendar integration and shared calendars

Google Docs integration/export/import/link/auto-invite

To-do/Tasks

Timeline extension

Brainstorm/Mind mapping extension

Issue Tracking

What is available and has been used in the Wave and would be useful to PM’s are the following:

• Planny – Permit you to plan an event with the participants of your wave and to propose them different possible times. Then each member of the wave can indicate whether he/she is free for each proposed time or not. Works exactly the same way as doodle.com.
• Mindmap – A Mindmap gadget which allows for collaborative editing of hierarchical data and ideas, including icons, import and export to freemind, voting and drag & drop.
• Napkin – Adds the ability to do quick “back of a napkin” sketches to a wave – collaborative doodling!

Some others that could have some applicability would be:

• Brainstorming – A simple brainstorming tool to collaborate on an idea tree. Participants can add, edit and move nodes.
• Taskboardy – This gadget allows to maintain a taskboard, as used in XP or Scrum. It provides all its basic operations, such as Create a User Story, a task, delete them, change the statuses of the tasks and assign the tasks.
• Google Calendar Robot - Robot recognizes date pattern in form YYYY-MM-DD (‘.’ or ‘/’ can be used for separator also) and updates it to link to add an event to user’s Google Calendar.

Both of the above lists are not meant to exhaustive. In fact, I know there are many other gadgets or robots that could be used for PM depending on the project itself. I would love to hear your thoughts on which robots or gadgets would help your particular project.

Another development for PMs interested in seeing a viable PM tool-set that is integrated with Google Wave is the announcement that ThoughtWorks will be developing a Google Wave Mingle gadget; go to their website to watch the video. It is an excellent example that will have PMs excited about their future inside Google Wave.

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