Microsoft Office 365 development: A collaborative story

By Patrick Hynds

October 29, 2012 — (Page 2 of 2)

Adapting to cloud development
The biggest culture shock for enterprise developers when confronted with the need to build a solution integrating with Office 365 is that the server and its DLLs are not readily available. This removes the tried-and-true Component Object Model programming model from the list of possible integration methods. To make things a bit more confusing, the Client Object Model offered for SharePoint Online development can also be referred to by its initials. The important thing to remember is that Software-as-a-Service and cloud computing as a whole are driving the need for developers to consume APIs made up of services.

The Client Object Model actually represents three different APIs that can be called from three distinct environments. Whether you are using JavaScript to provide a browser-based solution, developing for the .NET Framework version 3.5 or later, or working with Silverlight 2.0, there is an API in the Client Object Model available. Each of these provides a subset of capabilities taken from the Microsoft.SharePoint.dll. In the name of limiting size, these new APIs concentrate on client capabilities rather than server functionality.

This is similar to the client functionality focus of the Lync API. It is plausible that less server-side access is in our future, which would make sense given the need for Microsoft to ensure stability in a multi-tenant SaaS environment, but this could represent the biggest justification for larger enterprises and medium-sized businesses with aggressive internal developer teams to pass on Office 365 and stick with self-hosted implementations of their collaboration servers.

As a developer, you also have to contend with the features present in the levels of the offerings. The SharePoint component of the small business plan (Plan P1) SSL is not available, and the evidence that this is a common roadblock are the numerous posts by developers trying to figure out why they cannot make SSL work on their solution. Larger organizations would most likely not have this problem given that the Enterprise plans (referred to as E Plans) do support SSL.

This does not make larger organizations immune to the issue, since sometimes departments will acquire their own subscription, especially when piloting or doing proof of concept for the larger organization. This could result in larger organizations hitting the roadblocks that have seemingly been put in place to entice smaller organizations to take the higher-priced Enterprise offerings.

Marketplaces for all occasions
Microsoft Marketplace is the app store for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 apps, especially those conforming to the new user-interface model.

Microsoft Marketplace has gotten a great deal of attention, but there is also a marketplace for Office 365 available. If you visit office365.pinpoint.microsoft.com, you will find a searchable list of vendors and their offerings. Currently, the Office 365 Marketplace is mostly a clearinghouse for consultants looking to help monitor or implement Office 365 for clients rather than product offerings that enhance Office 365 offerings. This is in large part due to the fact that in these early iterations, Office 365 is a bit of a black box hosted by Microsoft. There is not much room for applications to install on the server running Exchange or SharePoint, meaning that the ecosystem is limited to those hoping to wrangle the offering itself.

The lack of a single consistent programming model across the components means developers have to ramp each up on its own time. It is likely that things will be more uniform sometime down the road, provided Microsoft does not change its mind about how these platforms fit together.

Related Search Term(s): Microsoft, Office 365, Windows

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