Perficient has today acquired Blue Rooster’s Rise Foundation product, a “UX as a Service” application for SharePoint (Online and On-Premises alike) that is basically a just-add-water intranet solution. The beautifully branded user interface, streamlined social and publishing features, and fully responsive design framework in the Rise Foundation package give organizations the ability to turn SharePoint into an engaging, accessible intranet portal with a minimum of the time and effort needed for a custom-developed solution. As you can imagine, we’re all pretty excited by this news.
Happily, I’m uniquely qualified to comment on the possibilities ahead for this product. At Microsoft’s Ignite conference this past May, I spent my time walking the floor researching various “boxed intranet” products for an article I later posted on CMSWire. At the time, I found the Rise UI to be friendlier than its competition, relying more on familiar website experiences and less on the “cutting edge”, Pinterest-flavored interfaces favored by other vendors (but not always by business users, who don’t like to be confused).
In the past few months, I’ve gotten to know the product much better. My initial confidence was buttressed first by a deep analysis a Perficient colleague performed on the technical back end—Rise cleaves closely to Microsoft’s Office 365 Patterns and Practices, a best-practice claim that not every such product can make. I was further impressed by the ability to further customize and build out desired functionality for our clients on top of Rise, if needed—a powerful value-add now that the weight of Perficient’s Microsoft delivery team is there to augment a first-class product development group.
On top of all of this, I’m personally thrilled to welcome the Rise team on board. I’ve known Blue Rooster for a very long time, and I can say with confidence that this move allows us all to work together to build on what was already some very exciting momentum. There’s no doubt that the future of SharePoint and intranet portals in general is one where products play at least as great a role as the services that support them, and I’m thrilled to say that Perficient now shares that view.
I’m looking forward to doing great things with Rise Foundation, SharePoint and our customers. Have questions? Drop me a line at rich.wood@perficient.com or ping me on Twitter!
