Microsoft

Since the early days of Office 365, the discussion of changing UPNs has been had between consultants and clients. The discussions range from “what is a UPN” to “this line-of-business application uses UPN for login, the application would need to be reinstalled and the vendor is no longer in business”. During Office 365 deployments, I […]

If your organization is using Office Communicator and/or offers cell phone allowance, now is likely an opportune time to reevaluate. Here’s insight on just a few Skype for Business (formerly known as Lync) features that we will see in the near future. These features will enhance your webinars, demos, and team meetings. “…as meetings grow […]

Exciting news as Gartner research recently published their Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Storage Services and recognized Microsoft Azure as a leader for the second year in a row based on completeness of their vision and ability to execute. The amount of digital data produced each year is growing exponentially. According to IDC, by 2020 total […]

The practice of email “archiving” probably goes back as far as email itself. Over the years, the reason for archiving emails has changed and as the corresponding technologies have evolved, it brings into question whether this practice even needs to continue. Before enabling functionality that moves email data from it’s original location, it’s worth discussing […]

Are you unaware of what Yammer is? Are you unsure of why you should consider it? Here’s some insightful guidance: What is Yammer? “Yammer is a social network that’s entirely focused on your business (Brad Chacos, PC World).“ It is an easy to use platform for dynamic communication at all levels and facets of an […]

Have you ever wondered how Microsoft provides an SLA of 99.95% for Azure? 99.95% is quite high, it means that the Azure service is available the entire year with only 4 hrs and 23 minutes of downtime. How does Microsoft guarantee this level of service? Fault Domains A fault domain is a physical point of […]

On June 24th, Microsoft hosted a “Beyond Build and Ignite” event at our local MTC office. The event was well-attended by clients looking for additional information on top of the hours of video content available from the last month’s Ignite event. In addition to Perficient being one of the sponsors of this event, I was […]

Perficient is all about helping customers with their Digital Transformation initiatives, and there’s a lot of curiosity around the topic. While most people think of digital marketing and customer experience first and foremost, just as Nigel Fenwick, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research mentioned during a webinar last week, business efficiency and optimization is […]

Office 365 offers several different identity options. Well known are the options to use “cloud identities” or directory synchronization from your on-premises Active Directory. For authentication, Microsoft offers the option to use “password hash sync” or Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) along with your on-premises Active Directory. There is, however, another option when it […]

  First let’s start off with what a Reverse proxy is and then cover how it fits in with with Skype for Business Server. The Reverse proxy is a device that receives requests from clients on and then forwards the request on to another resource, in this case a Skype for Business Front End server. This is done in […]

Azure storage service supports two types of blobs (blob, or BLOB, stand for Binary Large OBject, i.e. an unstructured binary data): block and page blobs. Blob type is selected when blob is created and then it can’t be changed. Although both blob types allow for storage of large binary objects in Azure, they are optimized […]

Pull out your cell phone, go to any app, and chances are that app has a search box. The same is true of most websites. Our ability to find information in a cloud-first, mobile-first world is driven by search capabilities. Azure Search is a search-as-a-service solution that allows developers to incorporate great search experiences in applications without […]