Objective founder and CEO Tony Walls says his newly revitalised relationship with Microsoft reaffirms his long felt “calmness around SharePoint” as a market disrupting force. 

At Objective’s annual Collaborate user conference held in Sydney in October 2014, Walls demonstrated the tight integration between the Objective ECM 8 platform and Microsoft’s Office365 cloud.

He said we can expect a swag of upcoming announcements of closer integration between Microsoft platforms and the Aussie company’s information management and workflow solutions.

“SharePoint, and Office365 are fantastic collaboration tools while Objective ECM is a great EDRMS and ECM tool,” said Walls, who is also evaluating Microsoft Azure as a platform for a number of Objective’s cloud solutions. Microsoft announced this week that Australian Azure data centres are about to launch in Melbourne and Sydney.

Objective has rebranded the cloud-based collaborative document authoring suites formerly known uEngage and uCreate as the Objective Enterprise Content Creation (ECC) suite. The cloud platform enables governed authoring and publication of complex documents with a growing customer base in financial services and the public sector.

A major update of the Objective ECM platform is expected to see light of day in the second half of 2015, meanwhile Walls is delighted with uptake of the Objective ECM Version 8, which is on track for 90% adoption by customers before the end of year.

Objective also reports over 12,000 users across 68 countries of its cloud based secure case file exchange and collaboration platform, Objective Connect.

At Collaborate, Australian federal government agency IP Australia outlined how it is using Objective Connect to tackle the daunting task of managing legal documents between warring parties on patent infringement cases.

Walls noted that while Objective’s traditional customer base is within government, almost three quarters of the users of Objective Connect are outside of the public sector.

“This tells us how much is happening between the public sector and private industry, and how important the need is for strong records management applied to secure case file exchange,” he said.