"Our widget will make it easier for our clients to access our services. The majority of connections to the SNCF.com Web site have only one purpose: to click on a link to a site with a more complex URL, like Voyages-SNCF.com," said Ang'lique Ferec, of TGV's sales and marketing department. "Our widget aims to make travel easier, and will centralize access to four Web sites: voyages-sncf.com, Grands Voyageurs (a loyalty program), Info-Trafic and TGV.com. The key, for us, is to take advantage of the Vista launch, with Microsoft's marketing strength, to get people talking about our services and to present ourselves as innovators."

"The widget memorizes the user's details and calls the Web service corresponding to their request [ticket booking, information about the loyalty program, or traffic information] via a hidden redirection page which queues requests in case of overload," said Cyril Garnier, director of development for SNCF CRM Services. Microsoft has certified the widget (a free service that guarantees its quality and its safety), and will distribute it through an online gallery of widgets. The TGV widget will also be available from a micro-site on TGV.com.

FullSix pitched the concept at the end of October 2006, and SNCF ordered the work two weeks later, for a total cost of '20,000 (US$25,940). The agency had to talk with developers at Microsoft to sort out the technical problems because the TGV widget is, today, the world's only certified widget that calls on Web services.

"The widget is downloaded in the form of a 70K-byte container containing an XML description, some JavaScript functions, a few images and the custom style sheets. It's very light because, unlike equivalents from Yahoo, Google or Apple, Vista's widgets are based on components already installed by default in Vista," said Alexandre Vannier, director of FullSix.

Using WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) to build an expert system