Sneaking past the corporate firewall - projecting business data

What would happen if a business, or even an individual application user, could project business data onto a secure workspace in the cloud? What scenarios would that enable and why would they be interesting?

 

That's a topic that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about recently. In fact, it's very much the only thing I've been working on since I moved on from my last team. Let's look at one scenario that's simple to understand, has few moving parts, and doesn't require a ton of security. The CRM product supports several customer service scenarios, one of which is the problem database / knowledgebase. KB articles are interesting in a few ways because depending on the direction they "face" they support different roles. An inward facing KB article supports a call center world where the support representative relies on the KB contents to help solve problems. In this case the articles don't need to contain pretty formatting, they don't need to be "customer-ready", and they don't even need to be secure. The most important thing is that they're discoverable.

 

Outward facing KB articles have a higher bar they must meet before becoming "public" as it were. [I'm going to leave the term "public" open to interpretation for a while because it really depends on the role of the consumer.] They must be correct, applicable to a given problem domain, discoverable, formatted reasonably, and "customer ready". That is, there may be internal information which shouldn't be presented for technical, legal, or other reasons.

 

I won't go into the requirements for how to provide external access to this internal data. That's something that's described in the internet connector toolkit and license, and typically requires an IT support staff, a partner's time, and at least a quart of your own blood. I'm working on ways to reduce that cost to the business and make projecting this data as simple as hooking into the normal workflow.

 

Let's see where this takes us...