Office 365 PhotoSync and the third-party market for Office 365

Office 365 has its own thriving MVP community, and fellow MVP Loryan Strant sent me an announcement of a new product he’s developed for Office 365: PhotoSync. The purpose behind the tool is to ease the process of managing user photos in enterprises by providing a better tool for managing user photos. There are tools that provide similiar functionality for on-premises deployments, of course, but this tool’s unique approach (or perhaps unique marketing, as I haven’t tried it myself) is to focus on the fact that many Office 365 deployments will use directory synchronization to get directory information from the on-premises deployment to Office 365.

Using a shared hosted service means accepting some compromises; for example, Microsoft greatly limits subscribers’ ability to customize SharePoint or to configure various aspects of Exchange such as database and DAG settings. This might seem to limit the possibilities for developing software products to supplement Office 365. I think it’s a healthy sign that third parties such as Loryan are developing add-ons and utilities for use with Office 365, although I suspect that only the most agile organizations will be able to identify opportunities and exploit them fast enough to keep up with the cadence of feature and service updates that Microsoft seems to be aiming for.