“Without Connect Bridge, this would be a fairly ambitious task, especially when both our Exchange and SharePoint are in the cloud. Thanks to Connect Bridge, all this effort was reduced to few SQL statements.”
Tobias Kuran, SharePoint Developer
About Lobodms
Lobodms has over 15 years of experience in Document Management Systems. It is developing one of the most innovative product for managing documents on the market.
The Challenge
In terms of our SharePoint strategy for DM Dokumenten Management GmbH, we had a requirement to build a calendar that should roughly represent the availability of each employee in the company. Since SharePoint has no separate list, except the calendar, that has to be managed, the personal Outlook Calendar was considered to be the main source of data.
Regarding this situation, our exact assignment was to import availability information (free/busy) from the personal calendar in SharePoint. This was a pretty ambitious endeavor, especially as our Exchange and SharePoint environments are in the cloud. We were supposed to evaluate all interfaces, and perhaps even completely develop the new ones, which can be a very complicated and time-consuming challenge when working between Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.
The Solution & Result
All these and many more obstacles were avoided thanks to Connect Bridge. We managed to work with our cloud versions of Exchange and SharePoint quickly and easily. All complications and integration challenges that we at first anticipated, have been solved using only the SQL commands in the Connect Bridge. We were able to deliver a solution way faster, with much less effort, without studying the API documentation. Now every employee has access to the availability of his or her colleagues. Planning meetings and internal collaboration is now much faster and smoother.