Read data from Office 365 Active Directory

Question

With the release of Office 365 can someone tell me the support available for custom visual sandboxed web parts created using Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools that fetches an Office 365 active directory attribute values for a particular user? E.g. If my company already has existing users in a local Active Directory environment when I subscribe to Microsoft Office 365, there are tools for synchronizing those users to Office 365 directory. Let say I have synchronized my local Active Directory to Office 365 Directory, now is it possible to programmatically or OOTB way to read Office 365 directory attribute’s value for any Office 365 Directory user? I have a custom attributes added to my local Active Directory one of the attribute is “CC Number” and I want to get the value associated with this attribute for some XYZ user.

We have an Office 365 SharePoint application to which we would like to add either (or both) a custom sandboxed web part and a OOTB web part that only reads a data from an Office 365 Directory for respective Office 365 directory user.

Is this type of functionality supported with the first/current release of Office 365?

Answer 1

it's a really common scenario that organizations will move parts of their systems into the Microsoft Cloud by using Office365. In order to get rid of the additional AD management overhead you have to build a federation on AD level.

You need a SecureTokenService which does the authentication for your users. Microsofts implementation of STS is ADFS (ActiveDirectory Foundation Services) which could easily be plugged into an existing AD structure. Your AD has to be 2008 I think.

There is a good ebook from Dominick Baier and some other security guys available. It's called "Guide to claim based identity", you can read it online on http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff423674.aspx or there is anywhere a download it think... can't remember sry.