Top of mind for most clients these days is how to use technology to digitally transform their business. And within this is the underlying current of always putting the customer first. Whether it is improving communication by moving Exchange to the cloud, or streamlining collaboration with SharePoint online – the end goal is to be able to:

1. Access information;
2. Translate data into actionable advice; and
3. Use that information to improve the customer’s experience – no matter the industry

We’ve been helping companies create the most effective digital experience for their customers through digital strategy and planning, content strategy, experience design and digital marketing.  For example, we recently did work with Humana to give a more consistent look and feel for all of its customer facing sites working with Sitecore. But we are excited to say that we can now help our clients take customer experience to the next level.
This week, we announced the launch of our new digital agency, Perficient Digital. With the strategic imagination of an agency, unleashed by the deep technical know-how of a consultancy, our agency helps companies with digital strategy, experience design, digital content, digital marketing, and mobile and emerging technologies.

Perficient Digital aligns particularly well within the Microsoft capabilities due to Microsoft’s advanced technology platforms such as Office 365 and Azure, along with the work we do with both Sitecore and Rise Foundation. All are focused on delivering the ultimate in customer experience through solutions like:

• A custom SharePoint interface that allows sales to better achieve its goals
• An end-to-end Sitecore experience platform based on Azure that provides customers with a personalized experience from click one
• Our Microsoft and agency team work together to ensure that exceptional customer experiences translate to positive ROI for our clients

With the introduction of Perficient Digital, we can now offer full-service capabilities designed to adapt to your ever-changing, ever-increasing business challenges. We dream big, build beautiful, measure confidently, and optimize obsessively. End-to-end is just the beginning.
To learn more about Perficient Digital, visit PerficientDigital.com.
To learn more about specific Microsoft offerings, click here.

Quintiles, a biopharmaceutical services organization headquartered in North Carolina, has a global reach that demanded the highest of communication and collaboration standards. Quintiles maintains offices in over 60 countries, and nearly one third of its workforce is mobile. Security is also of the utmost importance, and after realizing the security safeguards Microsoft has established within Office 365, Quintiles moved forward with a rapid deployment of Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business, all in the cloud.
Perficient was excited to see our work on this implementation highlighted in a recent Microsoft case study:

“Quintiles coordinated and prioritized the user migrations, and Perficient executed the actual mailbox moves, moving up to 2,200 mailboxes each week—and setting an industry standard—without having an impact on business operations.” — Quintiles Microsoft Customer Story

To learn more about Perficient’s expertise in both the cloud and Office 365, read our latest guides here. To read the full Quintiles Microsoft Customer Story, click the image below.

Franklin Energy is the leader in program administration and implementation for utility clients across the U.S. in both the residential and commercial sectors. Their tag line (and go to market solution for its clients) is energy efficiency.
The company, based in Port Washington, Wisconsin, wanted to simplify and streamline the process for its clients looking to apply for and receive efficiency rebates. There have been many technology innovations throughout the utility and energy industry, but the rebate process was one area where breakthroughs in innovation seemed to be lacking.
Perficient worked with Franklin Energy to build a proprietary portal on Microsoft Azure. The user-friendly portal allowed customers to more easily participate in the rebate programs, find rebates, submit applications, research contractors, and check on project status; all with a reduced chance of error by eliminating paper work and potential human error.
Through the help of the Azure, Perficient and the proprietary portal, Franklin Energy has been able to attract more clients and help spread their vision of using energy more efficiently across all industries.
Learn more about Franklin Energy’s customer portal here and here.
 
 

Join Perficient on Wednesday, April 13th at 1:00 p.m. CDT for a live webinar to discuss how to move your strategic business processes to the cloud. Matt Morse, Perficient’s general manager of the Microsoft modern applications business group, and Amar Gowda, solutions architect at Perficient, will discuss how working with both Nintex, the leader in business automation workflows, and Rise Foundation, the Software as a Service (SaaS) product that transforms SharePoint for Office 365, can change how you manage, integrate and extend your business processes via the cloud.

Perficient is excited to announce that both Stephen Tynes, Sitecore Practice Director at Perficient, and Jon Upchurch, Sitecore Practice Architect at Perficient, have been named a “Most Valuable Professional (MVP)” by Sitecore, the global leader in experience management software. Tynes and Upchurch were two of only 177 people worldwide to be named a Sitecore Technology MVP this year. There are more than 10,000 certified developers in Sitecore’s global network.
Now it its tenth year, Sitecore’s MVP program recognizes individual technology, digital strategy, and commerce advocates who share their Sitecore passion and expertise to offer positive customer experiences that drive business results. The Sitecore Technology MVP Award recognizes the most active Sitecore experts from around the world who participate in online and offline communities to share their knowledge with other Sitecore partners and customers.
“We are thrilled for Stephen and Jon to be recognized as Sitecore MVPs by Sitecore. This is a great honor and a testament to their quality of work and to the contributions that they make to our customers, to Perficient, and to the Sitecore community.  We look forward to the continued development of Sitecore platform expertise and leadership within our Sitecore consultancy,” said Jason Barrett, General Manager, Perficient.
Perficient was named a Sitecore Platinum Implementation Partner in March 2015 and continues to demonstrate its capabilities in terms of depth of expertise in Sitecore deployments and our understanding of customer experience management in terms of leveraging the Sitecore platform.  Perficient has been a Sitecore partner since 2003 and has over 40 certified Sitecore developers throughout the organization.
“We are grateful for the leadership, expertise, and ongoing contributions that both Tynes and Upchurch have made to the Sitecore community,” said Pieter Brinkman, Director of Developer and Platform Evangelism, Sitecore. “Stephen Tynes and Jon Upchurch have demonstrated a mastery of our technology and this exemplifies the spirit of Sitecore.”
Sitecore’s experience platform combines web content management, omnichannel digital delivery, customer insight and engagement, and strategic digital marketing tools into a single, unified platform. The platform is incredibly easy to use, capturing every minute interaction—and intention—that customers and prospects have with a brand, both on a website and across other digital channels. The end-to-end experience technology works behind the scenes to deliver context marketing to individual customers, so that they engage in relevant brand experiences that earn loyalty and achieve results. To learn more about how Perficient can help you with your Sitecore experience visit us here.

Moving your business from an on-premises SharePoint environment to the cloud-based Office 365 (O365) environment can be a complex, costly, and time-consuming process.  That’s why a lot of companies take a piecemeal approach.  Some of the business will stay on-premises, as they move a piece at a time to the cloud.
This is a safe and reasonable approach.  Now what if you have business processes, built using Nintex Workflow and Forms on-premises and you are moving part of that to O365?
There are few things you can consider.
Moving the Entire Business Process
This is feasible to do.  Building a workflow in Nintex Workflow for Office 365 is a little different from the on-premises version, in that we are dealing with very different environments, with different workflow engines and security.  But for the most part, you can do everything you were doing on-premises, in Office 365.
Take into consideration, that there may be a different way to design your workflow in Office 365, compared to the way you did it on-premises.
Moving Part of a Business Process
Splitting up a business process into two, an on-premises piece and O365 is possible too.  This is actually what a lot of people do at the start, since business processes are rarely limited to a single list, library, or even site.
There are usually logical places in the workflow that a business process can be split into two or more distinct processes.  If that is the case, a process that you have that starts in your on-premises environment, can get to a logical place in your workflow to then kick off a workflow in Office 365.
To get this part working, you’re going to need to use the Office 365 specific actions in the on-premises version of Nintex Workflow.  When you have your workflow open, on the ribbon, click on the Nintex Live Catalog button.  From here, you’ll be able to add actions from the catalog, into your designer.  The easier next steps, would be to open the catalog and do a search for O365.  Then, when you’re provided with all the actions, click Add-on for the ones that you need.

There are a few specific actions that most people use in this scenario.  Office 365 Create List Item or Document Set.  This will create an item in an Office 365 list and will instantiate a workflow.
Also take into consideration, that sometimes you will want to not create an item, but instead update or even delete an item. Or, in the situation where you are dealing with documents, you could be uploading a document to an Office 365 document library.
Communicating Back to On-Prem
Since most on-premises environments are locked down, this may not be a possibility.  From an Office 365 workflow, you could call a couple of web services in your existing environment.
The first, being the Lists.asmx web service, and more specifically, the UpdateListItems web method.  This allows you to create, update, or delete items.  By creating or updating an item on-premises, it could automatically start a workflow.
The other option, is to call the Nintex Workflow web service that lives on-premises.  This will allow you start a workflow on an item, a document, or to start a Site workflow.
But, this does mean that you need to expose your on-premises environment.  But I hear there are interesting way of accomplishing this goal, without exposing the entire farm.  For example, only allowing a specific URL to be exposed, and that could be to the Web service, and would require authentication anyway.
Conclusion & Perficient at InspireX
Are you looking at having a hybrid environment?  Let us know what you’re trying to do.  It’s interesting to see exactly what people are doing and what kind of solutions they come up with, and how Perficient and Nintex can help.
Don’t forget that Nintex is also hosting its first customer and partner event, InspireX, February 22-24, 2016 at ARIA Resort in Las Vegas. Matt Morse, general manager of modern applications within the Microsoft group at Perficient, will lead a breakout session on hybrid solutions using Nintex and Office 365. Most organizations with investments in Office 365 and Nintex have needs provided by other cloud platforms, as well as business applications that run within their own data centers. This session will show how Nintex Workflow and Nintex Forms can help bridge this heterogeneous environment, creating seamless user experiences that cross application and platform boundaries.
InspireX will provide customers and partners with valuable best practices, inspiring customer success stories, and fun networking opportunities.

Do you remember your very first airplane ride? I do, I was eight and I was headed to Disney World. So a double whammy of happiness – first time on a plane and first time to Disney. I don’t recall being scared to get on the plane, or being nervous when landing, or even when in the air for that matter. The only thing that scared me was take off, and I think that is how a lot of organizations still feel about putting their data in the cloud. It’s nerve wracking to take something that is important to you and your organization and put it someplace where you can’t have 100% control over it.
Why is it so scary to move to the cloud? Why is security still a check box on the list of concerns in moving data to the cloud? Is it really any different or less secure than keeping company and customer data on-premises?
Let’s find out.
The truth is moving your data and services to the cloud is no less secure than keeping it on-premises. Both come with pros and cons, and honestly your data may be even safer in the cloud. A few key items to think about before moving any data or services to the cloud:

• If you currently have an on-premises server what does your life cycle road map look like in terms of integrating cloud services as the on-premises server ages out?
• What is your SLA with the cloud provider?
• What devices and people are you allowing to have access to the data; and what data can they see?
• Are you planning to move to a private, public or a hybrid cloud environment?

Personally I love this quote from way back in 2011 from a Microsoft blog:
Network World cites this quote from Executive Director of IT, Nathan McBride, AMAG Pharmaceuticals who is building an IT infrastructure wholly in the cloud:
“Security is my favorite topic because I’ve yet to meet a single person who can show me specifically in some legitimate, substantive, concrete way that the cloud is less secure.”
People have been talking about, and concerned about, security in the cloud for a very long time and yet we continue to move more and more data and services to the cloud. Sure there are challenges, because no environment is perfect – on-premises or otherwise – but that doesn’t mean the cloud isn’t secure. For example, there has been years of collective security experience dedicated to designing, reviewing, building, auditing, and monitoring cloud solutions – that organizations can collectively take advantage of rather than having to support in a one-off on-premises private environment.
IDC, for example, shows in the graph below that spending on IT cloud infrastructure will outpace that of non-cloud IT infrastructure over the next 4 years; with cloud spend reaching $53B by 2019, accounting for 46% of the total spend for all of IT infrastructure (up from $32B in 2015).

Obviously organizations are spending money on the cloud so rather than look at security as a roadblock let’s look at it as part of the overall plan when moving data to the cloud. Make sure the security box is checked off.

Has your organization ever considered the business issues listed below? SharePoint 2016 is here and now is the time to determine how it can help your organization today.

If you answered yes, to any of the above, download our latest guide today to learn more about how to use SharePoint 2016 and collaborate in the cloud on your terms!

More than 50 million business users leverage Office 365. However, many enterprises simply implement Exchange and stop there. Office 365 has so much more to offer!
This guide takes a look at five key features that you may be overlooking:
1. Skype for Business: Users across the globe can come together to collaborate on projects, using their preferred devices.
2. SharePoint Online: It’s more than just content management. Business users can implement SharePoint Online for MySites, enterprise social networking, and blogs.
3. OneNote: Improve productivity by sharing notes and diagrams in the cloud – all documents are easily searchable across various devices.
4. OneDrive for Business: Seamlessly share files with colleagues, partners and associates, and retrieve files no matter your location or device.
5. Delve: Search and discover using Office Graph.

Understand the benefits of Office 365 beyond Exchange and how those services can help your organization leverage the cloud to improve productivity, collaboration, and communication on a global scale – download the guide today.

Nintex, a valued partner of Perficient, is hosting its first customer and partner event February 22-24, 2016 at ARIA Resort in Las Vegas.
Matt Morse, general manager of modern applications within the Microsoft group at Perficient, will lead a breakout session on hybrid solutions using Nintex and Office 365. Most organizations with investments in Office 365 and Nintex have needs provided by other cloud platforms, as well as business applications that run within their own data centers. This session will show how Nintex Workflow and Nintex Forms can help bridge this heterogeneous environment, creating seamless user experiences that cross application and platform boundaries. Perficient will:

1. Communicate the tenet that success in a process-oriented environment is driven more by user experience than by where the software is running.
2. Demonstrate the ability of the cloud-based version of Nintex to integrate with other cloud platforms and with on-premises scenarios.
3. Demonstrate the ability of Microsoft’s Azure platform to provide a vehicle for extending Nintex capabilities beyond Office 365 and other cloud platforms.

InspireX will provide customers and partners with valuable best practices, inspiring customer success stories, and fun networking opportunities.  Register today to see how Perficient and Nintex work together.

Earlier in 2015 H.J. Heinz Company and Kraft Foods Group combined in a $46 billion deal to create Kraft Heinz Company – now the 3rd largest food company in North America, the 5th largest in the world, and over $29 billion in net sales in 2014. That’s a lot of numbers. With a lot of numbers, come a lot of people that need to work together. This is where Perficient and Microsoft come into play.
Prior to the merger, Heinz realized that in order to allow employees to communicate and collaborate across its global environment it would need to make a move to Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus. The company engaged Microsoft and Perficient to roll out the Office 365 solution using Click-to-Run to very quickly deploy to over 14,000 users across 32 countries in just 10 weeks. For the full customer case study please click here to learn how Perficient and Microsoft worked together to make this solution possible for Kraft Heinz. Further, watch the video below to see the solution in action.

Look for future posts for a more detailed technical overview of how Perficient and Microsoft worked together to move Kraft Heinz to Office 365.