MediaValet Announce Office 365 Integration

Last week, Canadian DAM vendor, MediaValet, announced they had integrated their Azure-based Cloud DAM solution of the same name with Office 365:

“Today, with the launch of the Office 365 enabled version of MediaValet, staff, partners and vendors of an organization can quickly and easily access, search and attach or insert corporately approved photos, videos, logos, animations, audio files, documents, presentations and other corporate marketing and communications material (Content or Brand Assets) directly from inside Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.” [Read More]

Thus far, while quite a number of vendors have already done the same with the desktop-based Office suite or SharePoint, rather fewer have done this with Office 365, although I do expect that to change fairly soon.  I gather there are products available which support Google Drive, but more as a storage facility rather than direct integration with the application-suite so you do not need to leave it to access assets in the DAM.

In a number of organisations I deal with, there seems to be more of a mix of suites  than used to be the case.  Six or seven years ago (possibly even less) the MS Office stack was more or less a given and deployed, as standard, across all corporate desktops.  Recently, there has been a bit more competition from Google and I see quite a few places where both a cloud and desktop product are in-use, sometimes simultaneously by the same person (usually where the cloud equivalent cannot deal with the same range of tasks as desktop-based office suites).

Although it will take time, it seems likely that the desktop editions will gradually disappear as corporate IT departments get fed up of supporting them and the fact that no major office suite vendor will want to maintain support for them either.  Which office stack will acquire pre-eminence is harder to predict.  As ever with these kind of pivot points in technology trends, third party vendors can either pin their colours to the mast of one player, or they can hedge their bets by integrating with more than one.  The first option involves risk that the larger suitor might fail in their attempts at world domination, the latter is a lot more work involved in developing plug-ins and connectors etc to deal with it, along with any internal architectural changes (and combined with the knowledge that some of the work might ultimately prove to be  a waste of time and effort).  Since MediaValet are strongly Microsoft-focussed, the choice is easier for them, but other vendors might prefer to play this more cautiously even though it will be more expensive and time-consuming to do so.

At this point, for end-users (especially those who have not finalised choices about cloud versions of productivity suites) it might be more of a case of assessing the architectural versatility of a given product rather than specific support for one technology over and above another while all this remains in a state of flux.  This is not always easy to discover, but if the provider has integrated with a number of other technologies that often gives some clues.  Those vendors which have comprehensively documented APIs and who don’t say things like ‘we’ll have to get back to you’ when asked to provide them on-demand are likely to be better placed for these kind of challenges.  While you don’t want to be doing the integration yourself, your prospective DAM partner should look like they’ve successfully done this kind of exercise many time before (and not just by telling you they have, but with some actual proof also).

We have added two questions to our DAM vendor directory covering support for Office 365 and Google Drive (in addition to the desktop MS Office suite which is already present).  Premium account holders can access this information as and when vendors update their profiles to indicate support for either of them.

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