Making our Sharepoint Integration More Intelligent: Seamless BI Access

Last summer, we announced an integration with Microsoft SharePoint that enables companies to easily give customers and partners secure access to a mix of on-premises and cloud apps through a SharePoint-powered external portal. But as customers started taking advantage of this integration, we encountered a second challenge – giving access to Microsoft’s integrated Business Intelligence (BI) stack via SharePoint, which previously relied heavily on a Kerberos authentication.

With this update to our integration, we have now made that access seamless. Businesses with distributor or supplier partners can share BI apps and SQL data through their externally-facing portals, for example, making sure companies have a complete solution for managing access to this valuable data.

Rick Koppin, the practice area director at Slalom Consulting and a key partner of ours with deep Microsoft experience, pointed out that “extending critical BI data to these [SharePoint] users has required a significant amount of customization and integration. Okta is addressing this complex problem in a very simple and powerful way, helping organizations evolve their SharePoint instances from collaboration portals into true business productivity platforms.”

For companies betting on Sharepoint as their collaboration platform, this is a game-changer. Now with Okta acting as the identity layer in unified portals and consumer facing websites, IT departments can easily and securely leverage existing investments in SharePoint outside of the company.