Enhancement to Okta's Integration With Microsoft SharePoint Enables Organizations to Securely Surface and Extend Business Intelligence Data to Trusted Partners or Customers
San Francisco, CA – Marketwired - May 13, 2014 – Okta today announced a significant enhancement to its integration with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and 2013. With Okta, enterprises can now expose on-premises business intelligence applications and SQL data to federated external users through SharePoint, enabling more powerful and productive experiences in customer or partner-facing portals.
The announcement builds on the already proven integration of Okta's cloud-based identity management service with SharePoint, which was released in late 2013 to enable enterprises to more easily extend on-premise SharePoint instances to external users. 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. As a result, companies can securely connect critical distributors, suppliers and other business partners with the enterprise apps and services they need to do business while maintaining their own secure and independent user stores.
With the enhanced SharePoint integration, Okta is helping companies make portals significantly more powerful by enabling seamless access to authenticated business intelligence apps and SQL data. Traditionally, this kind of data could only be accessed by internal users whose credentials were stored in the company's own directory. Okta has addressed this challenge and now gives enterprises the ability to provide access to users coming from external directories, leveraging the same credentials they use to access applications within their own organizations.
"Customer and partner-facing SharePoint portals have become a core component of driving performance and productivity for companies. To date, however, extending critical BI data to these users has required a significant amount of customization and integration," said Rick Koppin, Practice Area Director at Slalom Consulting. "Okta is addressing this complex problem in a very simple and powerful way. They're effectively helping organizations evolve their SharePoint instances from collaboration portals into true business productivity platforms."
Many companies are deploying SharePoint-based portals for customers or partners that include a mix of cloud and premises-based applications. For example, a distributor portal could provide a mix of product information in a cloud-based storage application, a cloud-based collaboration application and inventory data from an SQL database. Or, a supplier portal could provide access to a cloud-based invoicing system and analytics from a business intelligence system. Traditionally, the premises-based data sources could only be exposed to internal users via a Kerberos ticket. This new feature from Okta provides a complete solution for managing access to these types of portals for external users.
"We've already seen remarkable business growth from customers that use external SharePoint portals to collaborate with customers and partners," said Eric Berg, chief product officer at Okta. "Today, we're exposing and extending the value of these critical SharePoint portals to increase access to more applications for more users. In doing so, we're empowering IT leaders to worry less about managing technology and focus more on deploying solutions that enable efficient, productive workflows for all users -- for employees, but also customers, partners and other external audiences."
To learn more about Okta's SharePoint integration enhancement, please visit: https://www.okta.com/problems-we-solve/identity-for-sharepoint-portals.html.
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