Office Online Integration to Third-Party Partners

There was another really interesting announcement today from the Office 365 team.

There is a new Office Online Integration capability being offered to cloud storage solution providers to allow them to offer Office Online Integration and user experiences for files that are residing on other data storage platforms.

· This will enable Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files to be opened, viewed and edited on platforms other than OneDrive and OneDrive for Business.

· This drives on Microsoft strategy for continued support for devices and browsers across platforms.

· Partners can use Office Online to build previews of Office files into their solutions.

· Partners can use this as a way to introduce Office file editing into their applications.

· Consumer users do not need an Office 365 subscription nor do they need to log into Office Online. However if the user is an Office 365 subscription users need to use their subscription.

· The integration is achieved by 1) create a browser application with some javascript, and 2) implement WOPI REST endpoints on top of your service (ContosoDrive). Pretty straight forward.

· There is additional information referenced below for authentication, security, file conflict resolution, file IDs, versioning, desktop integration, etc.

Overall I find this direction very exciting.

For more information about the announcement read here - http://blogs.office.com/2015/02/17/new-cloud-storage-integration-office/

Microsoft have created the Office 365 Cloud Storage Partner Program which provides partners information on how to create integration points. Right now there is iOS menu integration and Office Online integration. There are targets to add more to this program. More details can be found here along with technical references - http://dev.office.com/programs/officecloudstorage

Here is the technical reference to actually start building this integration - https://msdn.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/dn913043.aspx.