New Feature Updates to Sharepoint Online – Office 365
As part of the November 2011 service updates to Office 365, a new set of features were added to Sharepoint online. The most important features that are available are connectivity to Line of Business data through BCS and external sharing.
Business Connectivity Services
Business Connectivity Services (BCS) feature in Sharepoint online allows connection to external data sources via web service endpoints. This feature will enable organizations to surface their Line of Business data from applications such as CRM or ERP within Sharepoint online. As with on-premise Sharepoint 2010 BCS in Sharepoint online can work in both reads and write modes.
External Sharing
Sharepoint online now includes the functionality for collaborating with people who are not part of the company. With this external sharing capability, external users can be invited to Sharepoint online for viewing and sharing information. This feature will be greatly useful when companies want to share a certain set of documents with their vendors, partners or contractors.
Apart from BCS and External Sharing, there are other improvements and fixes done to Sharepoint online. The notable feature is an extension of support to IE 9 and Google Chrome browsers.
These new feature sets added to Sharepoint online makes it keep up to the motto of connecting and collaborate from anywhere and with anyone.