Palm Platform and Microsoft 365 Apps
Special to PalmInfocenter.com
In a modern digital world, plenty of technologies exist to simplify or improve people's day-to-day lives. Some of these technologies are aimed toward casual use cases, and others are created to help with work-oriented tasks. There is also a lot of unexplored potential regarding integrations and cooperation - the ability to use multiple tools or applications simultaneously to boost their overall results.
Several different integrations have started a whole wave of changes in the industry. Collaboration between Microsoft 365 and Palm devices is one such example, bringing far more attention to mobile devices in the context of workforce assistance than ever before.
Palm devices were originally produced by Palm, Inc. - a company that previously led the Personal Digital Assistance device industry. This company completely changed how people approached mobile devices as a whole, offering more portability, ease of use, and capabilities than ever before. Quite a lot of time has passed since then, with tablets and smartphones dominating the market right now, but most of it would never have enough resources and investments if it were not for Palm's original success.
Microsoft 365, on the other hand, is a family of productivity applications developed and distributed by Microsoft. It includes business-focused solutions such as SharePoint and Outlook, but there are also several well-known standalone applications, such as Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.
The introduction of PDA devices such as Palm opened a flood of potential actions that were previously unattainable, including the ability to access SharePoint sites and Microsoft 365 data down the line. The ability to access work data using a mobile device brought a completely new level of flexibility and efficiency than ever before, and it was expanded upon multiple times afterward to turn it into the version we know right now.
Of course, this kind of integration between two entities has its faults. The existence of Microsoft 365 as a completely virtual service makes it extremely dependent on constant Internet connection, which can be difficult to obtain in some areas. The topic of data consistency is also quite important, requiring powerful synchronization mechanisms to be implemented. Additionally, these kinds of integrations as a whole often relied on middleware and custom applications in the past, making them difficult to work with. Luckily, that kind of experience is mostly in the past now.
To be fair, original Palm devices have not been in active production for quite a while, but the original concept of this integration lives on to this day and improves itself on a regular basis. Modern-day tablets and smartphones act as an expanded version of Palm's original offering, presenting each user with a myriad of opportunities and capabilities, be they work-oriented or for personal use only. The topic of security is also relevant here - just as it was relevant all these years ago.
Security is among the most important topics for all Microsoft 365 elements (especially workforce-oriented ones, such as SharePoint). The existence of a multitude of mobile devices that can access sensitive information on the go creates plenty of risk for data breaches. Luckily, there are plenty of third-party solutions that can cover all kinds of issues of Microsoft 365 platform.
For example, the issue of lackluster labeling capabilities can be solved with third-party software that expands upon existing Microsoft 365 sensitivity labels, be it with a policy-based ABAC solution or via any other option. Many software uses its capabilities to improve Microsoft Purview Information Protection's capabilities (built-in labeling solution).
Another topic that is worth mentioning in the context of M365 issues is privileged access. The problem of overprivileged access has existed for a while now, and it has always been difficult to solve since the line between necessary and excessive permission levels is very thin and blurry. Fortunately, the appearance of various data-centric third-party security software on the market made the issue of Office 365 privileged access management a lot easier to work with, offering complete data protection and dynamic permission management based on many deciding factors.
Permission management as a whole is a surprisingly sensitive topic for Microsoft 365 and its applications. There are thousands of examples of departed or fired users retaining their permissions in the system, making it possible to perform all kinds of actions, including data theft and various disruptions.
One of the biggest issues with this particular problem was always permission management and discovery - finding what user has which permissions, for example. Native tools in apps such as SharePoint are not capable of helping with permission discovery on a regular basis. As such, there is a need to perform regular SharePoint Online permissions audit.
This kind of audit is often performed using third-party software, offering a comprehensive overview of the entire system in terms of permissions while also highlighting potential permission oversharing and other problematic locations in your permission map.
All three of the aforementioned issues can be solved using archTIS software. ArchTIS is a well-known software developer that offers comprehensive security software with data-centric security, encryption key management, and plenty of other convenient features.
