The digital workplace is changing for companies worldwide, and financial institutions are no exception to this. Companies are continuously striving to improve the ways employees interact with company assets, clients and processes to deliver effective results easier, faster and efficiently.

A key Belgian insurer had recently moved to Microsoft’s Office 365 as a platform of choice for hosting it’s internal knowledge base and intranet. Many of the company’s assets were already migrated from legacy on-premise solutions into a single, consolidated platform offering in the cloud.

But several applications could not easily be moved to the cloud – mainly due to technical dependencies of the products or processes reliant on the application. But that doesn’t necessarily mean employees cannot operate these applications from the cloud. The conscious choice was made to deliver a solution that would expose some of these applications using a cloud-hosted interface, which would then interact with the systems on-premise (and vice-versa) to produce a similar (and possibly better) way of interacting with the on-premise applications.

The application in this scenario was Adobe Livecycle, a form platform that was used to generate a large array of documents and forms targeted at all client segments of the insurer. Based on input received, document branding and content would be tailored to reflect the appropriate subsidiary company, the client segment receiving the form and of course the language in which the document would be drafted.

The objective we received was to disclose the functionality of this form in an interface, accessible from the SharePoint platform, that would interact with the on-premise application hosted somewhere in the data center.