Bob Graham

Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a great option for SharePoint Server deployments for those use cases and/or organizations where SharePoint Online is not appropriate or sufficient.  IaaS can be used for dev/test scenarios or a part of a production, cloud-based infrastructure. With SharePoint Server 2016, deployment without Active Directory is no longer supported;  Active Directory is […]

The report of my death was an exaggeration – Mark Twain & SharePoint Server On-Premises SharePoint Server On-Premises was, in the recent past, presumed obsolete. While Office 365 and Cloud Computing are juggernauts, compelling use cases continue to exists for On-Premises deployment. Realizing this need, Microsoft is working toward a Q1 2016 release of SharePoint […]

This week, Microsoft announced the release of an Office 365 Video Portal (see Office 365 Video ). This is an exciting first step into an area of great demand and large potential. In the past, many larger enterprises purchased dedicated 3rd party solutions for the management of video content. Smaller organizations typically leverage You Tube.  […]

Given the central role that Office 365 occupies for more and more businesses, integration of the resources managed by Office 365 with other services is a challenge that Perficient often addresses for clients. The good news is that the Office 365 platform and the architecture of many other, key platforms provide countless integration possibilities, many […]

    Given the central role that Office 365 occupies for more and more businesses, integration of the resources managed by Office 365 with other services is a challenge that Perficient often addresses for clients. The good news is that the Office 365 platform and the architecture of many other, key platforms provide countless integration possibilities, many […]

One of the many advantages of using Office 365 is freedom from a myriad of worries at the data center (watch this video for an interesting glimpse at Microsoft data centers), server, and application levels.  One of the most important concerns for any enterprise is that of “business continuity” – making sure a service is […]

Microsoft has just announced general availability of “Infrastructure as a Service” for Windows Azure (see  Windows Azure and IaaS), including support for Virtual Machines and Virtual Networking.  With this offering, Microsoft is attempting to provide a compelling alternative to options such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Cloud Servers, etc.  As competition heats up, pricing is becoming […]

A while back, I blogged about both the driving factors and a recommended process for automated installation of SharePoint 2010 (see Automating Sharepoint 2010 Installs). As more and more of our clients are deploying SharePoint 2013, I’ve had a chance to revisit and revise the process for SharePoint 2013. The good news for those of […]

As the excitement surrounding SharePoint 2013 increases, those of us who make a living helping companies deploy SharePoint are beginning to consider the Governance implications of the latest release. The need for SharePoint Governance has, of course, not gone away with the new version (there is still no Governance “check box”).  Quite the contrary, the […]

One of the more basic “value-adds” of SharePoint is the abstraction of IIS web sites and data stores as “web applications” and “site collections”.  Because this abstraction has worked well, there has been no fundamental change to these concepts in SharePoint 2013. In cases where there is a need for a larger number of site […]

As part of the release of the SharePoint 2013 Preview, Microsoft has provided a series of diagrams covering a variety of infrastructure areas.  One of the more interesting can be regarded a synopsis of farm topology best practices.  Even though this diagram can be rendered on a single page (click here to review an interactive version), it is filled with a […]

Configuring a SharePoint 2010 Farm is a non-trivial undertaking. Each of the servers in the farm must have the correct software installed. In addition, a myriad of accounts, databases, applications, and services must be correctly installed, created, and configured on each server. Typically, a project team requires three or four different farms (development, integration, validation/test, […]