Sharepoint 2013 : Office 2013 and an Overview of Integration (part 3) - SkyDrive and Office 365

3. SkyDrive and Office 365

Thanks to a large proliferation of online storage services and hosted solutions, consumers and organizations are now taking advantage of the “cloud.” As the days of saving sensitive and important data on local computers and servers become outdated, so does the complexity that typically associates with maintaining recent and relevant backups.

As with most new inventions, the home market was the first to embrace the cloud with services to sync and host working files, such that home users could save files to a working folder on their computer and software would ensure that these files replicated on a cloud service, somewhere on the Internet. The commercial and government markets soon followed the home market when organizations began to realize the cost savings and benefits of hosting important data on secure replicated cloud services.

Microsoft has long been a player in the race to provide cloud-computing services, competing with such organizations as Google and Amazon. You may have heard of Microsoft Windows Azure Services—a cloud solution for hosting scalable server infrastructure and services like SQL Server, Exchange, and now SharePoint.

After the release of SharePoint 2010, Microsoft launched Office 365, an online-hosted Office solution for small, medium, and large businesses to take advantage of Microsoft Office Enterprise software solutions for a monthly fee. Office 365 has gained a lot of interest over the last few years because organizations no longer need to purchase and own costly network infrastructure and pay licenses for Windows Server, Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, and Office on workstations. As a result, Microsoft has increased marketing for Office 365 and targeted this platform as the way forward for all business organizations to embrace SharePoint in the cloud.

3.1 Office 365

The great thing about Office 365 is that organizations can host SharePoint solutions, be it an intranet, extranet, or publishing site, via Microsoft’s O365 platform and make the service available to their audience of choice seamlessly. The end user has no idea that the SharePoint solution is in the cloud, rather than on-premise (hosted by the organization). Office 365 will federate with an organization’s Active Directory and can host on any purchased domain name; thus, SharePoint in O365 looks and feels like an on-premise hosted version of SharePoint, accessible via a common organization-specified URL.

Note  At the time of writing, Office 365 provides both SharePoint 2010 for older customers and 2013 for new customers. Microsoft is in the process of migrating customers from 2010 to 2013.

In the following set of steps, I shall demonstrate saving a new Word document to a team site that I have hosted in Office 365 Preview (SharePoint 2013).

• 1.  Open Word 2013 and create a new blank document.
• 2.  Add some content/text.
• 3.  Click the File tab.
• 4.  Click the Save As tab in the left navigation tabs.
• 5.  Click the Add a Place option and then select Office 365 SharePoint (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Saving to Office 365 SharePoint

• 6.  Sign in to your O365 SharePoint—unless your organization has federated authentication, your username will likely be something like user @company.onmicrosoft.com.
• 7.  After signing in, click the Browse button.
• 8.  Similar to how we saved a document to an on-premise SharePoint site, Word displays a Save As dialog with browse capability in the O365 SharePoint site (Figure 8).

Figure 8. Save As Dialog to save to SharePoint

• 9.  Navigate to the Documents document library.
• 10.  Provide a file name for the new document.
• 11.  Click the Save button.

As you can see, saving to Office 365 SharePoint is almost identical to saving to a SharePoint on-premise instance. This is exactly the point—Microsoft has achieved the same user experience with Office 365 as users would experience with an on-premise hosted version of SharePoint 2013.

Opening a file from Office 365 SharePoint is as easy as opening a document from on-premise SharePoint. You can navigate to the document via the SharePoint web interface and edit the document or open the document from within the Office application, as I demonstrated in the section “Opening from SharePoint.”