Silverlight in BPOS SharePoint Online and communicating to on-premise service

Question

I want to enable self-service for employees starting with the ability to update simple contact information into AD. The twist is that I want this as a web part in SharePoint Online as my company uses BPOS. Employees would log on, change their details and it gets back to the company's AD.

Initial investigations have shown that you cannot add custom web parts but you can add Silverlight components. I have found examples that work with SharePoint Online services and presume that I could reference an on-premise service that I've publicly exposed? This service would then work against the company's AD.

Any tips or direction would be appreciated.

Answer 1

The component that you add to SharePoint Online would have to communicate, via for example a web service, with an onsite component. That on site component would run in a security context of a user that is allowed to update AD.

Note be very carefull when you do this exposing a web service that can update your AD can be dangerous. You need to consider how the web service is secured and that the account used to run it has minimum required rights.

Answer 2

Investigation has found that you can reference your own service from a Silverlight component by nothing more than the usual 'Add Service Reference'. Make sure you have a CrossDomain policy file. You can work with the SharePoint Online services fine. Check out this