I know what you’re thinking… another hollow “were in the cloud” fluff piece. Yes, it seems like everyone is saturating us with messages about how they are cloud-ready, cloud-enabled, or cloud-riffic! This blog post doesn’t contain any of that nonsense. What we are announcing here is a real, brand-new class of products for SharePoint called Cloud Parts™. For those of you already familiar with SharePoint – think Web Parts in the cloud. Cloud Parts are functional components that extend your SharePoint environment whether it’s hosted, on-premises, or part of Microsoft® Office 365. More than mere ports of existing software to the cloud, our Cloud Parts have been built from the ground up to take advantage of the best that the cloud has to offer. This includes benefits such as…
- Zero installation,
- High scalability,
- Rapid deployment, and
- Seamless updates.
As of today, we have released our first set of 6 charting Cloud Parts in Beta to Bamboo Labs. There you will find Cloud Parts to create Motion, Time Line, Pie, Column, Map, and Organization charts of your SharePoint data. All are free for you to try. Since all Cloud Part code is hosted and run from a cloud-based server, there is nothing to install and no need to bother IT. The only thing that is required to deploy a Cloud Part™ on your site is the permission to modify a SharePoint page. 
Yes, my introduction to this blog took a few fun shots at the huge amount of hype surrounding cloud computing today, but I certainly don’t want to leave you with the impression that here at Bamboo we are dismissing its importance. We agree that the expansion of cloud infrastructure, cloud services, and cloud applications will cause a fundamental shift in the way many organizations do business. As such, we know that the demands of our customers will change as well. Our efforts to develop and launch Cloud Parts have been made to help keep our customers ahead of the technology curve and to continue to provide them with answers now and into the future.
Now that you know a little bit about what Cloud Parts are and how they can help your SharePoint deployment, visit the Cloud Part area of our website to learn more or to try one today. We’d love to hear your feedback so feel free to send us an email or post a question to the Cloud Part product forum on Bamboo Nation.
Interested in learning more about the technology behind Cloud Parts? Be sure to keep an eye out for Jonas Nilsson’s upcoming Cloud Part blog post here on Bamboo Nation.
