Getting the Enterprise Business- the new SOCIAL EDGE
Microsoft in its 2014 SharePoint Conference held in Las Vegas announced some very interesting roadmaps ahead for Office 365 and SharePoint. This blog will focus more on O365 updates.
At the outset, Microsoft has clearly reflected the four pillars its believing in- personalization, proactive insights, sophisticated collaboration and easier responsiveness. The updates in O365 clearly focus on these pillars.
A whole new bunch of Application Tools:
Microsoft has lined up lot of tools and development updates to O365 which enable easier development of apps. The new updates makes it possible for developers to build apps against O365 APIs as a whole, not being specific per se SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and Azure AD. This will certainly make the lives of developers much easier. The link outlines an extensive and detailed laundry list of all the updates on the developers front.
Also, NAPA O365 development tools have been updated which will facilitate developers to work in the browser window directly, which means they don’t need IDEs.
The Machine Language Angle:
Getting the right data/content from multiple sources has always been a challenge for most of us. While the world out there is facing a data explosion, we too struggle with our laptops/PCs.
Office Graph is essentially an extension to Yammer’s Enterprise Graph. It maps your relationship between your conversations and information encompassing posts, likes, uploads et al across 0365.
With multiple applications Lync, SharePoint, Outlook, Yammer- it can get little worked up to segregate or isolate data. O365, now gets on-board Machine Language thru “Office Graph” which presents you with your required data from all sources of 0365. One of the first offerings from Office Graph is Oslo, which does the integration from sources and presents the right data.
OneDrive for Business:
Microsoft is launching a standalone subscription to OneDrive for business at $5/user/month offering 25GB of storage space. Users have option of expanding the storage for an additional cost. It has also got some advanced features like mobile app support (iOS), increased file size support. Some of the new features include- search box (with type ahead), site folders view, simpler controls.
Conversations anywhere
O365 allows you to have conversations documents in SharePoint Online and OneDrive.
Groups Experience
Groups Feature would let you integrate data from across your sources namely Yammer, Emails, Calendar and enables you to share data with your group seamlessly
Advanced features
PowerPoint APIs will be able to integrate polls/surveys within decks and Outlook APIs will be able to offer insights next to emails.
A video portal for sharing videos
To Conclude..
Microsoft has taken massive steps towards the objective of enabling business connectivity to a much higher level with these integrations. The focus has been to highly leverage the capabilities that cloud brings along with offering users the much needed social integration thru- mobile, big data and machine learning features. Armed with strong principles and fundamentals for security, governance, compliance and risk, O365 amalgamates powerful and disruptive technologies to offer you not just an intuitive but a highly productive experience with a laser sharp focus. O365 definitely is all out there to make your work experience truly collaborative. The experience is definitely a much more cohesive one for users.
Anita Raj
Technology Evangelist
Team@MSExchangeguru
March 16th, 2014 at 10:35 am
Why would you give all your Data / Emails to the vendor in the Public Cloud / Office 365?
And the Vendor will have access to your Data / Emails.
March 17th, 2014 at 9:47 am
Agree with Joe, lots of Security issues with giving all your Data / Emails to the Vendor in the Public Cloud / Office 365.