Last week at Knowledge I partnered up with Robert Fedoruk and Travis Toulson for the CreatorCon Hackathon. We had a blast and I think we did pretty well for only having 8 hours to put the application together. Our application was a real-time point of sale system on top of Service Catalog.

In many organizations, a good percentage of employees will still approach the help desk directly without going through self-service. This forces the help desk to manually create the requests on the spot. There isn't really a quick and easy interface for this, so having a point of sale system would greatly expedite the process for face-to-face transactions with the help desk.

We built our application using Service Portal making use of record watchers and integrated it with the native mobile app for bar code scanning. It uses the Service Catalog and with no custom tables. The application was built with touch screens in mind with support for gestures. And best of all the whole application operates across multiple devices all in real time.

When the transaction is complete, it sends a push notification receipt to the users mobile device.

I don't think it's just limited to point of sale, something similar could also be used for inventory management, supply chain management, warehouse management, etc. where managing products and inventory must happen in realtime across locations and devices.

What do you guys think? Would your organization use something like this? I'd love to hear your thoughts in comments below.