Last week I talked about a cool web slice Hallmark Cards developed to let you track important events in your Facebook friends’ lives. Well, this week I have another cool web slice, one developed by Winchester Ammunition (a division of Olin Corporation) out of East Alton, Illinois. This web slice is significant because it uses Silverlight to deliver a rich experience while leveraging SharePoint Server to host and manage the content of the web slice.

You see, late last year, Winchester launched the new version of their public web site on top of SharePoint Server. They’re leveraging primarily the content management and search capabilities on winchester.com. When they looked at how to deliver content to their IE8 web slice, they wanted to reuse as much as they could. So, working with Aspect Software (formerly Quilogy of St. Charles, Missouri), the hooked their Silverlight client for the web slice, which was custom built for the 320x240 web slice pane, and hooked it into the RSS feed, product catalog and streaming media areas of the winchester.com web site.

The result is a rich, intuitive application that allows Winchester’s customers to connect to important industry news and product information whenever they like without interrupting what they’re currently doing in the browser. This is a win for the customer, but a win for Winchester as well. By the user installing the web slice, Winchester wins much sought-after real estate in the browser and has a place to connect with their customers as often as they like.

Check out the Winchester web slice on the IE Add-ons Gallery. Even if you’re not a hunter or shoot for sport, it’s a good way to look at an new and innovative way to leverage rich content delivery to connect with your customers.