4 Years in the Microsoft Office 365 Cloud

I wasn’t sure Microsoft would win the world over with their O365 Cloud solution when I first migrated from our on premise technology into their cloud 4 years ago in 2011, but from where I stand now I can see their vision clearly. Back then we migrated our Exchange, Lync and SharePoint solutions into the then 2010 O365 Cloud. It has been quite interesting to be along for the ride so to speak as Microsoft has delivered on almost all of their promises. The cloud is secure, uptime is as promised, I was upgraded to 2013 without any issues and 2015/2016 features have been rolling out slowly, but surely.

I still can’t access all the APIs we’ve been promised, but they are removing barriers. It’s definitely in Microsoft’s best interest to make their cloud solution more and more viable for business. We saw our first clients move to the O365 cloud in early 2014, and I think 2015 & 2016 will be the years we see the rest of our clients make the shift as well.

One major hurdle that we’ve successfully overcome with the cloud is integrating line of business system data into O365. Trust me, your workers want this, but more than that, they need it to remain productive. This type of integration not only provides your users access to the data they need from any line of business systems they cannot access directly, and can also allow users to utilize the data by tagging files for search in a way they’ve never done before. This was a huge pain to implement even 2 years ago.

Here’s the problem:

1. I want access to timely Line of Business System data, but don’t have access to that Line of Business System.
2. I want to use Line of Business System data for tag my various asset files in order to make finding them later easier and more efficient through a typical web search experience.

There’s a solution:

Microsoft’s Office365 SharePoint integrated with Line of Business System Data.

I won’t dive into the technical details on how best to achieve this integration in this article, for details on delivery please read the following blogs from our Senior Consultant, Kenny McGarvey:

1. Azure & O365
2. SharePoint & SSIS