Chris Hines

I am truly inspired by the direction Microsoft has taken in recent times with the move to iterative development, open tooling and open source. At its core Office 365 is a suite of services providing OOTB experiences and a set of APIs ready for consumption. The experiences will satisfy many of the requirements for Portals, […]

OneDrive is leapfrogging the competition for document management, collaboration and sharing. It’s hard to fully quantify the benefits of using OneDrive for your file collaboration and sharing because it’s already part of Office 365. By virtue of being on the platform OneDrive already has the advantage of built in: Search, eDiscovery, Data Loss Prevention and […]

On Star Wars day the force is most definitely with SharePoint. SharePoint is here to stay and continues to form an integral part of Office 365. Let’s take a look at the Top 5 innovations announced today… #1 Page Rendering Model There is a radically new page rendering model. SharePoint pages previously relied a lot on […]

It has been a busy couple of years working with SharePoint Online in Office 365. Perficient has been full throttle migrating organizations to the Microsoft Cloud adopting workloads like Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Skype as well as making sense of new innovations like Delve and embracing Social with Yammer. Particularly within the last year there has […]

The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) Conference is off to an exciting start! The Perficient team is in Las Vegas this week to present our solutions for the Legal industry including our partnership with Microsoft on the new Matter Center for Office 365. Matter Center was built for Microsoft’s own Legal and Corporate Affairs group […]

SharePoint makes great use of its Search engine and it is pervasive throughout most SharePoint solutions today. Whether you are building Content Search WebParts leveraging Display Templates or creating a custom Search center you will be making use of SharePoint’s powerful and mature Search engine. However, what happens when things behave unexpectedly? How can you […]

Personal sites (formerly known as My Sites) are provisioned on demand in Office 365. Only when the user first clicks e.g. their OneDrive link in the suite bar is their personal site actually provisioned. This was a prudent architectural decision on Microsoft’s part to not provision space until it is actually needed. Anybody who managed […]

As a technical architect I am used to the rapid evolution of language to describe an accelerating technical world. Only a couple of years ago using the word Cloud would most likely conjure images of the cumulonimbus variety. Today I rarely join a conference call where The Cloud is not mentioned and we can be […]

I was recently preparing a presentation for a Chicago SharePoint Saturday. As I built out my slides explaining some O365 DevOps best practice it struck me that an Agile methodology could be the only viable methodology to deliver and maintain SharePoint Online projects. Here’s why… At Perficient we have embraced SCRUM for many SharePoint projects […]

In my last blog post about DevOps for SharePoint Online the process I presented relied a lot upon scripted deployment to SharePoint Online (O365). I wanted to expand upon that a little and explain in a little more detail about how Perficient is using PowerShell to manage our deployments for our Development, QA and Production […]

With the rapidly evolving migration to the cloud SharePoint teams are faced with a new challenge: How do we develop and deploy for SharePoint Online? If your feet have been firmly planted with on-premises development for SharePoint it can be a little daunting trying to move your process to the cloud. Where and how should […]

I started working with SharePoint 2013 RTM today on a Windows 2012 Server. My initial project is to do with search so I quickly created a Search Service Application and performed the minimal configuration to begin crawling the ‘Local SharePoint sites’ content source. Everything looked good so I started a crawl on this source. I quickly realized that […]