Top Five Cloud Trends Expected in 2015
The sad fact of the matter is that when it comes to managing a project, most people rely on a spreadsheet rather than an actual project management application. But now that there is a project management application in the cloud that is tightly integrated with Microsoft Office 365 and Azure Active Directory, that may soon change.
Smartsheet this week announced that it has leveraged Azure AD and the Microsoft Office 365 application programming interfaces (API) to tightly couple its project management software with the most widely used set of productivity applications in the cloud.
Brent Frei, chief marketing officer for Smartsheet, says that now that Microsoft has deployed a stable API for Office 365, it’s clear that a major ecosystem of third-party applications leveraging that API is about to emerge.
Smartsheet, says Frei, is specifically designed to allow users to import data from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets into a project management application in the cloud that feels like a natural extension of Office 365.
While the existence of Smartsheet in the cloud may not drive everyone away from using Microsoft Excel to manage a project, Frei says the existence of Smartsheet will at the very least provide a mechanism through which it becomes a lot easier to share that data with other users of Microsoft applications.
It’s pretty clear at this point that Office 365 momentum inside enterprise IT organizations is significant. The next big thing to watch is to what degree Office 365 becomes the next big application platform in the cloud.
