In SharePoint Online, folders are still widely used to organize content – mainly in document libraries where projects or departments are grouped at the top-level. However, when users want to apply a SharePoint Document Library filter by folder name, the platform lacks built-in support.

Image: “SharePoint Document Library with Top-level Folders”

In one of my projects, users wanted to create a view that showed only documents under a specific top-level folder (like Department HR, Finance, etc.) – including its subfolders and all documents inside.

At first glance, it seemed this should be possible with built-in view settings. But I quickly learned: SharePoint does not support filtering by folder name out of the box.

Here’s what I found, what doesn’t work, and the scalable solution I implemented – including PowerShell and Power Automate scripts for anyone facing the same challenge.

What Works?

Navigating into a Folder

When you manually enter a folder (e.g., click into “Department HR”), the filter panel works on that folder’s content only. You can filter by metadata like Status or Modified By, but it won’t search across the whole library.

Flat Views Using “Show All Items Without Folders”

In view settings, if you choose “Show all items without folders,” SharePoint flattens the structure so you can filter and group across all documents, but the folder structure becomes invisible.

Image: “Document View Settings – Show All Items Without Folders”

Metadata Filtering (Best Practice)

If documents are tagged with a Project Name or similar metadata, SharePoint’s filter panel and custom views work beautifully, even in large libraries.

Image: “Filtering by DepartmentName Metadata”

What Doesn’t Work?

Image: “View Settings: No Folder Name Option in Filters”

Real-World Workaround: Metadata + PowerShell + Power Automate

To meet the project requirement (filter by folder), I implemented a workaround using metadata to simulate folder filtering – and automated the tagging.

The Plan

• Add a DepartmentName metadata column.
• Bulk-update all existing documents and folders based on their top-level folder.
• Automatically tag new files/folders using Power Automate

Step 1: Add the Metadata Column

1. Go to the SharePoint document library
2. Click + Add column → Single line of Text
3. Name it: DepartmentName
4. Optionally, add values like: HR, Finance, Sales, Marketing, etc.

Step 2: Use PowerShell to Tag Existing Files

Use PnP PowerShell to loop through items and set the DepartmentName (DepartmentName as Top-level Folder Name) metadata based on their folder path.

# Connect to your SharePoint site
Connect-PnPOnline -Url "https://xxxxx.sharepoint.com/sites/Centra" -UseWebLogin #replace it with your site

# Set library and column
$libraryName = "Shared Documents" #replace it with the Library name
$metadataColumn = "DepartmentName" #replace it with the coloumn name

# Get all items (files and folders)
$items = Get-PnPListItem -List $libraryName -Fields "FileRef", $metadataColumn

foreach ($item in $items) {
    $filePath = $item["FileRef"]  # e.g. /sites/Centra/Shared Documents/Document.docx
    Write-Host "`nItem ID $($item.Id) - Path: $filePath"

    # Split path into segments
    $segments = $filePath -split "/"
    $sharedDocIndex = $segments.IndexOf($libraryName)

    if ($sharedDocIndex -ge 0 -and ($sharedDocIndex + 1) -lt $segments.Count) {
        $candidate = $segments[$sharedDocIndex + 1]

        # If candidate contains a dot, treat as file => skip
        if ($candidate -notmatch "\.") {
            # It's a folder name, update
            $departmentName = $candidate
            Write-Host "Extracted Department: $departmentName"

            # update list item
            Set-PnPListItem -List $libraryName -Identity $item.Id -Values @{ $metadataColumn = $departmentName }
        }
        else {
            Write-Host "Skipping item ID $($item.Id) — directly under Shared Documents (file)."
        }
    }
    else {
        Write-Host "Skipping item ID $($item.Id) — no folder found after Shared Documents."
    }
}

This script checks the item’s path and extracts the first folder name after Shared Documents. If the item is in the root (i.e., not inside a folder), it skips updating.

To help you understand, here are some example paths and how they update the “DepartmentName” metadata column:

Result: Every document now has its DepartmentName metadata filled based on the top folder location.

Step 3: Power Automate – Auto-Tag Future Uploads

To ensure new documents are tagged automatically, set up a Power Automate flow:

Trigger:

• When a file is created (properties only)
  • Library: Documents
    

Action 1: Initialize a variable

• Name: varDepartmentName
• Type: String
  

Action 2: Set a variable with the folder name

Use this expression:

• split(triggerOutputs()?['body/{Path}'], '/')[1]

• Adjust the index in the split() expression based on folder depth.

Example:

• Consider a Path from trigger: “Shared Documents/HR/Employee/file.docx”
• Split Result: [“Shared Documents”, “HR”, “Employee”, “file.docx”] -> “HR” is at index [1] in this case.

That’s why we use: split(triggerOutputs()?[‘body/{Path}’], ‘/’)[1]

This retrieves the top-level folder name (e.g., HR), which can be used to set metadata like DepartmentName.

Action 3: Update file properties

• ID: ID from the trigger
• DepartmentName: use the variable (varDepartmentName)
  

Result: New files or folders uploaded into folders will be auto-tagged with the correct Department name.

Gif: “Auto-tagging flow in action”

Step 4: Create a View for Each Project in the SharePoint Document Library

Now that all documents and folders are tagged, you can create filtered views like:

• Department HR

Filter: DepartmentName = HR

• Department Finances

Filter: DepartmentName = Finances

You can also group or sort by Department name.

Conclusion

While SharePoint doesn’t support folder-level filtering, it offers powerful filtering and organization when you shift from folders to metadata.

By combining PowerShell for existing files and Power Automate for future uploads, you can create a scalable and maintainable structure that:

•  Works across 5,000+ items
•  Enables dynamic filtering and views
•  Simplifies user experience

Pro Tip: Index your DepartmentName column to improve performance in large libraries.

Considering migrating your contact center operations to the cloud? Transitioning from a legacy on-premise solution to a Cloud Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platform offers significant advantages, including greater flexibility, scalability, improved customer experience, and potential cost savings. However, the success of this transition depends heavily on selecting the right vendor and ensuring alignment with your unique business requirements.  

Here are five essential questions to ask any CCaaS vendor as you plan your migration: 

1. How will your solution integrate with our existing systems?

Integration capabilities are key and may impact the effectiveness of your new cloud solution. Ensure that the proposed CCaaS platform easily integrates with or provides viable alternatives to your current CRM, workforce management solutions, business intelligence/reporting tools, and legacy applications. Smooth integrations are vital for maintaining operational efficiency and enhancing the customer and employee experience. 

2. What degree of customization and flexibility do you offer?

Every contact center has agent processes and customer interaction workflows. Verify that your CCaaS vendor allows customization of critical features like interactive voice response (IVR), agent dashboards, and reporting tools (to name just a few). Flexibility in customization ensures that the platform supports your business goals and enhances operational efficiency without disrupting established workflows. Assess included AI-enabled features such as IVAs, real-time agent coaching, customer sentiment analysis, etc. 

 3. Can you demonstrate robust security measures and regulatory compliance?

Data security and compliance with regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, or PCI are likely critical requirements for your organization. This can be especially true in industries that deal with sensitive customer or patient information. Confirm the vendor’s commitment to comprehensive security protocols, including the ability to redact or mask Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Ask your vendor for clearly defined compliance certifications and if they conduct regular security audits. 

 4. What are your strategies for business continuity and disaster recovery?

Uninterrupted service is critical for contact centers, and it’s essential to understand how the CCaaS vendor handles service disruptions, outages, and disaster scenarios. Ask about their redundancy measures, geographic data center distribution, automatic failover procedures, and guarantees outlined in their Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

 5. What level of training and support do you provide during and after implementation?

It is impossible to overstate the importance of good change management and enablement. Transitioning to a cloud environment involves adapting to new technologies and processes. Determine the availability of the vendor’s training programs, materials, and support channels.  

 By proactively addressing these five key areas, your organization can significantly streamline your migration process and ensure long-term success in your new cloud-based environment. Selecting the right vendor based on these criteria will facilitate a smooth transition and empower your team to deliver exceptional customer experiences efficiently and reliably. 

Leveraging data that is ‘trapped’ within unstructured data files like PDFs is a powerful capability within Agentforce.  With an Agentforce Data Library this ability to surface PDF content through an Agent is now available in a ‘No Code’ fashion to all Salesforce Admins.

So what is our Agentforce unstructured data use case?

Let’s say we have a variety of PDFs about the warranty coverage for vehicles.  We have a customer Experience Cloud site where the customer will log in and see their current warranty information. We also want these customers to be able to ask questions about the warranty program.   At this point all of that warranty information is ‘trapped’ inside of these PDFs.  We could surface the actual PDFs or try to work with Knowledge within Service Cloud.  But we can do better: Let’s actually surface the data within the PDFs in a very effective way through a chat interface to these customers.  Let’s let Agentforce work effectively with this unstructured data.

First a demo of how this works.

1. Here is our Agent who is ready to answer our questions.
   

   Agentforce Agent Ready

2. Here is our question: For a 2024 Ford F150 how do I make a warranty claim? 
3. Here is the answer from our Agent
   

   Agentforce Agent Answer

4. It worked!  How do I know that?  Because the answer came word for word from the PDF content that I had uploaded earlier.
5. Here is a piece of that FAQ document that exists as a PDF.
   

   FAQ Content

How was this solution built?

1. An Agentforce Data Library was built.
2. Go to Setup, Search for Agentforce Data Library
3. Click on ‘New Library’
   

   Create new Agentforce Data Library

4. Give it a Name, API Name and Description and click on Save.
5. Once you have your Agentforce Data Library you have to choose between leveraging Knowledge or File Uploads.  You cannot do both in the same Library.  In our example we are doing File Uploads.
6. We then upload whatever PDF files we want so the content can be used by your Agent. In this example I uploaded a couple of FAQ documents about vehicle warranty information.
   

   Upload Files to Library

7. At this point when the file uploads occur there is a lot happening for us automatically in the background in Data Cloud.  Salesforce has ingested that PDF, chunked it out and placed the content in some Data Cloud objects so it can be indexed and easily retrieved.
8. The base object showing that the file has been uploaded goes in the ‘DMO’ called ‘RagFileUDMO’.  You can view it in the ‘Data Explorer’ in Data Cloud.
   

   File level DMO in Data Cloud

9. There are two other objects where the ‘Chunks’ of data live.  When we did the File Upload into the Agentforce Data Library, Data Cloud automatically pulled the content out of the PDF, broke the text/content into ‘chunks’ and then put those ‘chunks’ of text/content into a DMO where it is indexed and made to be searchable.   There is a ‘SI_chunk’ and a ‘SI_index’ DMO.  Here is the ‘SI_chunk’ one…
   

   Search DMO in Data Cloud

10. There will be use cases where doing a manual load into an Agentforce Data Library would not be manageable or scalable, so there are integration options where files (Unstructured Data) could be loaded into Amazon S3, Azure Blog or GCP and then automatically pushed to Data Cloud.  We will save those steps for another blog post.
11. Now that the PDF content is ready to be used, we need to tell our Agent to use this specific Agentforce Data Library.  An Agent can only point at one Agentforce Data Library so it knows specifically where to look.
12. Open up your Agent by going to ‘Agents’ in Setup and then using the drop-down to the right of your Agent to choose ‘Open in Builder’.
13. Now select the Agentforce Data Library you have created after you select the Library ‘Book’ icon on the left.
    

    Agentforce Data Library

14. We now want to make sure that our Agent will use the ‘Answer Questions with Knowledge’ Action when the user prompts the Agent with questions about warranty.
15. In order to do this I created a new ‘Warranty FAQ’ Topic and gave it instructions and examples.
    

    Topic Configurations and Instructions

16. Then I made sure it has only one Action, which is the ‘Answer Questions with Knowledge’.  This out of the box Action will use the Library that is associated with this Agent.
    

    Topic Actions

17. Note that if I did not create this custom ‘Warranty FAQ’ Topic the Agent might default over to the ‘MigrationDefaultTopic’ Topic and not use the proper Action.
18. Building proper and detailed Instructions is very important within an Agent.
19. Remember that you can do a lot of great testing and see which Topics are Actions are being selected and executed within the Agent Builder.

That is it!

We have an Agent that can leverage PDF content that was created with ‘No Code’.  This solution is fully within the Trust architecture that Salesforce has in place for Agentforce. We needed the Agentforce Data Library, our PDFs, and a new Topic.  That is really it!

If you are brainstorming about use cases for Agentforce, please read on with this blog post from my colleague Darshan Kukde!

Here is another blog post where I discussed returning structured data instead of the unstructured data we talked about in this blog post.

If you want a demo of this in action or want to go deeper please reach out and connect!

This blog will discuss my experience attending the 2023 Workato Partner Delivery Bootcamp in Bangalore. This was the first time Workato has organized such an event for Strategic partners in India. As a Strategic Partner of Workato, Perficient was invited to join their event to discuss the roadmap, future statistics, and share strategies.

It all started with our aircraft’s soft landing in Bangalore, followed by some heavy traffic. But that traffic didn’t stop us from achieving what we planned and promised before leaving for Bangalore. Because once Roy T. Bennett said

Great things happen to those who don’t stop believing, trying, learning, and being grateful.

This is what we felt like on the last day of the event.

Do you know why?  Let me share my experience of the why.

Workato Partner Delivery Bootcamp 2023

Workato conducted a four-day partner boot camp event to share upcoming plans, strategies, and many more. The event was not restricted to only planning, but they conducted sessions on different areas such as planning & design, development best practices, testing, deployment, and operational strategies. Their vision was to deliver integration more effectively and with clear development and deployment strategy.

This was the first time they conducted such a large-scale event for strategic partners in India. Workato invited more than 15 Strategic partners for the event. Sourabh Jain and I represented Perficient. Along with strategy discussions, they conducted a recipe-building session and a quiz related to the specific topic.

The Mysterious Workato

The event started with the welcome and introductions. The entire premises were set up and were completely boosted with positive vibes. All the Workato representatives came and had a conversation with us about our journey, stay, and experience in the integration field.

After interacting with all, the Workato team shared their agenda for the event for the scheduled four days. With that, the event began. They brought their experts there to demonstrate the topics, followed by the challenges and quizzes. They conducted a total of five quizzes, and Sourabh won two of them.

On the first day, we started with Workspace Management and the best way to structure your code and mostly to manage the code into your Developer org, followed by error handling and task optimization. On the second day, I learned more about the Architecture patterns, ETL/ELT, and APIM and HTTP connectors in detail. On the third day, we started with a very fun exercise: creating Bots and deploying those bots over other systems.

On the same day, they explained more about the troubleshooting & DevOps setup, followed by a deep dive into Workato SDK. All of this we covered in three days. On the final day, a hackathon showcased our capability and understanding. The hackathon was the only opportunity to showcase our skills and understanding, and yes… we did the same.

During these three days of events, we received ten badges for the representation of task completion.

The one who earned all nine badges was awarded one Super badge representing the Workato Tool expert.
No, wait, not expert! The Expert Chef.

Hackathon

The day of the hackathon arrived. There were around sixteen teams, with 5-6 members in each team who participated in the Hackathon. However, a team competed with only two participants, and that was Team Perficient. Yes, we competed, and we WON because numbers didn’t matter. On that day, we started building the code with all the best practices, and it took us around four hours to build the code and present the business requirement document.

In the first round of the presentation, we secured a place in the top four amongst all other fifteen teams. The first round was to filter the top four teams. As the competition moved forward, we presented our recipe to the main judges and all other audiences. It was a great presentation, and everyone appreciated the way we showcased what we built and how we followed all the best practices.

Amongst fifteen teams, we made it to the top four, and in the final showdown, we secured third place! We received appreciation not only from the Leadership team of Workato but also from the audience as well. Well…that was more than first place, but still, I think at that moment, there was major turbulence that we experienced about our feelings, that was mixed feelings. We were sad about the rank but happy to see they recognized our efforts and way of working. Everyone appreciated our presentation, demo, and interactions with us. They then asked us about the implementation style, steps, and use case.

At last, they distributed prizes and certifications to all the participants. So, was that the end of the event? Of course not!

There was one more event planned, the best event among all the four days of the marathon event. Happy hour!

Happy Hour

We interacted with all the representatives of other organizations, and they shared their stories about Workato practice and their way of working. I think interaction is a key aspect of sharing knowledge and experience and understanding different perspectives. We discussed their goals and roadmap with the Workato leadership team. We planned for a Workato in-person meetup at the Nagpur Perficient office. While interacting with them, we shared our thoughts about their product and our plan to expand our partnership with them.

What’s Next?

As a strategic partner with Workato, we are planning to organize an in-person meetup at the Perficient Nagpur campus, where we will interact with different recipe builders, discuss their experience with development, and present a few use cases to the Audience.

Perficient + Workato

At Perficient, we excel in tactical Workato implementations by helping you address the full spectrum of challenges with lasting solutions rather than relying on band-aid fixes. The end result is intelligent, multifunctional assets that reduce costs over time and equip your organization to proactively prepare for future integration demands.

In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a game-changer for various industries. One such industry that will be forced to utilize AI solutions to gain a competitive advantage is the regional insurance carrier industry.

By harnessing the power of AI, regional insurance carriers can streamline their operations, enhance customer experience, and make more informed decisions. I hope I can successfully convey some of the opportunities that insurers should explore, yet my list below represents only a sliver of the total possibilities.

Regional insurance carriers, often operating in a highly competitive market, face numerous challenges in attracting and retaining customers, such as a lack of brand awareness and distribution breadth. To overcome these challenges, they are increasingly turning to AI technologies. AI enables these carriers to automate processes, improve risk assessment, personalize customer interactions, and optimize pricing strategies. By leveraging AI, regional insurance carriers can enhance their competitiveness and deliver superior services to their customers. I’m not sure they have a choice to do anything else.

What are Some of the Areas Where Regional Insurance Carriers can Leverage AI?

1. Process Automation

AI allows regional insurance carriers to automate various time-consuming and repetitive tasks, such as claims processing and underwriting. By automating these processes, carriers can significantly reduce operational costs and improve efficiency. For example, AI-powered chatbots can handle customer queries and provide instant responses, eliminating the need for manual intervention. This not only enhances customer satisfaction but also frees up staff to focus on more complex tasks.

2. Risk Assessment

Accurate risk assessment is crucial for insurance carriers to determine appropriate coverage and pricing. AI algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data, including historical claims, customer profiles, and external factors, to assess risk more accurately. This enables regional carriers to offer tailored policies and pricing based on individual risk profiles. For instance, AI can identify patterns in customer behavior and predict potential risks, allowing carriers to proactively mitigate them. This personalized approach enhances customer satisfaction and reduces the likelihood of fraudulent claims. The mix of different types of new data sources and AI will be a powerful combination that today is in its infancy.

3. Personalized Customer Interactions

AI-powered systems enable regional insurance carriers to deliver personalized customer experiences. By analyzing customer data, AI algorithms can identify individual preferences, anticipate needs, and offer tailored recommendations. For instance, AI can suggest additional coverage options based on a customer’s lifestyle or provide real-time updates on policy changes. This level of personalization not only enhances customer satisfaction but also fosters long-term loyalty.

4. Pricing Optimization

AI algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data, including market trends, competitor pricing, and customer behavior, to optimize pricing strategies. Regional insurance carriers can leverage AI to dynamically adjust premiums based on risk factors and market conditions. This enables them to offer competitive pricing while maintaining profitability. For example, AI can identify patterns in customer behavior and adjust premiums accordingly, incentivizing safer driving habits or healthier lifestyles. This flexibility in pricing helps regional carriers attract and retain customers in a highly competitive market.

Conclusion

In conclusion, regional insurance carriers are increasingly leveraging AI technologies to gain a competitive advantage. By automating processes, improving risk assessment, personalizing customer interactions, and optimizing pricing strategies, these carriers can enhance their competitiveness and deliver superior services. AI empowers regional insurers to streamline operations, reduce costs, and provide personalized experiences to their customers.

AI will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in shaping the future of regional insurance carriers and carriers today are learning about its vast possibilities that go far beyond content creation capabilities and focusing more on what firms like Salesforce can provide, such as true customer data platforms.  

Last week, our team attended Red Hat Summit, in Boston, MA.  This past event marks the first time Red Hat combined Ansible Fest with Red Hat Summit. During the three-day conference, Red Hat partners, clients, and vendors got together to hear from Red Hat leadership, industry experts, and get hands-on experience with Red Hat platforms. The Perficient team learned about new capabilities and technologies, heard new product announcements, and connected with peers and clients from across industries.

The stars of Ansible Fest at this year’s Red Hat Summit were undoubtedly the imminent general availability of Event Driven Ansible and the release of a developer plugin called Lightspeed which takes advantage of generative AI to help speed up automation development.

Event Driven Ansible

General availability for Event-Driven Ansible (EDA) is set to be included with the next version of Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) 2.4, which should be available for subscribers beginning in June of this year. So, right around the corner.

EDA introduces the concepts of rulebooks which define sources, rules, and actions to kick off automation. Where sources are things like metrics from an APM like Prometheus or Dynatrace, security events from a SIEM, changes to files, and so on. Rules are the conditions to act on from the source. Finally, actions are the defined automation tasks to carry out, like running a playbook or launching a job or workflow from AAP due to its close integration with the AAP controller.

Event-driven content is already being certified by Red Hat for the AAP 2.4 launch. More content will be released in the Automation hub as partners certify and release it.

Some Key Features of EDA within AAP:

• A new Event Driven Ansible Controller which runs the always-on EDA listeners. The controller will have a familiar user experience for existing users of Ansible Automation Platform.
• Tight integration with the Automation Controller to launch job and workflow templates when expected events are triggered.
• Event throttling, which allows developers and admins to constrain the number of events that can trigger actions.

Ansible Lightspeed

With Ansible expanding to include the new EDA rulebooks, it’s important to maintain development velocity and quality. Red Hat’s strategy to help is to provide a powerful new VS Code extension leveraging IBM Watson-based generative AI.

Formerly known as “Project Wisdom”, Red Hat will soon be providing a targeted generative AI plugin for Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor. The demos presented in Boston last week were exciting. My take was that the plugin works like a slick combination of ChatGPT, intellisense, and tab-completion. If the final release is anything like the demos, developers will be able to prompt code generation with the name: block of an ansible task. Lightspeed will process for a moment and offer generated code complete with fully qualified collection names, parameters, and even variables inferred from vars blocks and imported vars files.

Lightspeed is still in a closed beta, so to get on the waiting list to try it out you’ll want to visit https://www.redhat.com/en/engage/project-wisdom#sign-up and make sure to include your GitHub ID.

For anyone concerned about being required to participate in the language model for Lightspeed, Red Hat made it a point to emphasize that the data collection for your ansible code will be an opt-in option, meaning data collection is off until explicitly turned on by you, the developer.

Interested in More Red Hat Summit Content?

Check out this video!

Perficient + Red Hat

Red Hat provides open-source technologies that enable strategic cloud-native development, DevOps, and enterprise integration solutions to make it easier for enterprises to work across platforms and environments. As a Red Hat Premier Partner and a Red Hat Apex Partner, we help drive strategic initiatives around cloud-native development, DevOps, and enterprise integration to ensure successful application modernization and cloud implementations and migrations.

Open-Source vs. Proprietary Software – What’s the Difference?

To thoroughly grasp what open source is, one should understand what it is not. Open source is not restricted by licensing agreements, and the user behind open-source software is not forbidden to change, edit, study, or redistribute manipulated versions of it.

Open-source software grants its users a degree of accessibility that is not possible through its proprietary counterpart. Open-source codes are published publicly for all who wish to study and manipulate them, whereas proprietary software keeps users more restricted, inside hard, iron-clad lines.

Richard Stallman, founder of the free Unix-style operating system GNU and leading voice in the open-source movement, asserts that there are four essential freedoms of open source:

1. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
2. The freedom to study how the program works and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
4. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. Doing this gives the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Open Source Is Essential for Modern Development

These freedoms, for Stallman and open-source advocates everywhere, are part of what makes open-source a huge driver of innovation. Due to its free nature, open source inevitably cultivates collaboration and prompts interaction among those in the software world. Code can be constantly shared in open-source environments. This leads to increased productivity because coders waste less time searching for solutions to problems, and it supports the diversity of skill sets.

If a glitch occurs when using proprietary software, especially in the business realm, one typically must go through many channels to get it fixed; open-source software, on the other hand, gives the user a greater sense of agency over issues and user experience. This is convenient for expert software engineers and is integral for educational purposes, as it allows students to learn through application. Any student of code, whether they be pursuing a degree in computer science, or a hobbyist trying to make their own program from scratch, can click “view source” in their web browser and dive deeply into the recipe of the site’s open-source code.

This education is also driven by the open-source community’s expectation that users will be active participants in its democracy. Open source follows the philosophy that all can contribute to the pot of knowledge, and discoveries should not be withheld under the guise of intellectual property.

Open source empowers the user over the program and encourages the utmost technological collaboration and education. It allows users the liberty to change the source, making it do what they want it to do. Rather than the user remaining stuck inside the constraints instilled by a proprietary developer, the open-source experience allows a higher potential to execute the exact desire of the user. The philosophy of open source flips the notion that one must maneuver code in the bounds of the preexisting and promotes a more dispersed power dynamic.

***

Perficient partners with many open-source companies to deliver innovative, scalable solutions to our clients. Interested in learning more about how your company can reap the benefits of open source? Contact one of our strategists today.

Salesforce World Tour NYC is just a few weeks away! This year’s event is the biggest World Tour yet and will be held at the Javits Center on May 4. It’s not too late to register – World Tour is free to attend. It helps cultivate a community of Salesforce thought leaders, technical experts, sellers, and partners for a day of learning and network opportunities.

The event features more than 250 expert-led sessions and 40 hands-on demos to help you accelerate growth with data-driven decisions, automation, and AI. View sessions and plan your day, but remember that all sessions are first come, first served.

Key times to keep in mind:

• 7 am EST: Registration opens
• 8:30 am-5 pm EST: World Tour Campus open
• 10:00 am-11:30 am EST: Main keynote
• 7:30 pm-10:30 pm EST: Concert featuring the Roots

Our team is excited to meet you there! Request a meeting with our industry and technology experts.

If you’re in town early, join us for a happy hour with Coveo on Wednesday, May 3, from 5:30-7:30 pm EST at Porchlight. Space is limited.

If you’re unable to attend in person, the majority of the sessions and demos will be available on Salesforce+ for streaming.

Why Perficient + Salesforce

We are a Salesforce Summit Partner with over two decades of experience delivering digital solutions in the healthcare, manufacturing, automotive, life sciences, financial services, and high-tech industries. Our team has deep expertise in all Salesforce Clouds and products, artificial intelligence, DevOps, and specialized domains to help you reap the benefits of implementing Salesforce solutions.

As one of few implementation partners with dedicated industry, Salesforce, and MuleSoft practices, we are uniquely positioned to solve our client’s challenges with an innovative approach that delivers intelligent, connected user experiences.

Healthcare organizations are addressing the need to innovate by adopting digital health platforms (DHPs). DHPs enable organizations to support the healthcare quintuple aim, which outlines the high-level goals of the industry: delivering better patient outcomes, reducing the cost of care, improving the patient experience, improving provider experiences, and health equity.

Using Salesforce Health Cloud, we can help address these outcomes by delivering digital experiences at scale with 360-degree patient data, intelligent care collaboration, and personalized end-to-end experiences.

Building a New Portal for an Enhanced Consumer Experience

With so many options available, choosing the right health plan can be daunting. It can be especially challenging if the process is manual and lacks the data needed for a streamlined health plan buying process. Our client’s health plan wanted to eliminate its manual, paper-heavy consumer health insurance enrollment process and replace it with a modern front-end application and portal for beneficiaries and brokers. It also wanted to integrate consumer and plan data from disparate systems into one portal.

To address these needs, we recommended Health Cloud as the ideal solution to enable the organization to combine clinical and nonclinical consumer data to drive efficiencies and put patients at the center of their care.

We execute our Shop, Quote, and Enroll solution for payers to build a user-friendly portal with Salesforce Experience Cloud for the health plan’s Medicare Advantage, Small Group, and Individual and Family insurance plans. We used Health Cloud to integrate data from disparate sources and leveraged Omnistudio to automate previously manual processes.

READ THE FULL SUCCESS STORY: Improving Health Plan Buying and Maintenance Processes With Salesforce

Why Perficient + Salesforce

We are a Salesforce Summit Partner with more than two decades of experience delivering digital solutions in the healthcare, manufacturing, automotive, life sciences, financial services, and high-tech industries. Our team has deep expertise in all Salesforce Clouds and products, artificial intelligence, DevOps, and specialized domains to help you reap the benefits of implementing Salesforce solutions.

Perficient strives to customize solutions to meet each client’s needs. While healthcare delivery, marketing, and operational issues may be shared across most of the industry, the solutions need to be adjusted to meet organization-specific business goals, target patient populations, and staffing strategies. We understand that the healthcare market is drastically changing. We are here to help healthcare organizations recognize recent and upcoming changes, and design and implement solutions to meet the person-centric needs of consumers.

As one of few implementation partners with dedicated healthcare, Salesforce, and MuleSoft practices, we are uniquely positioned to solve our client’s healthcare challenges with an innovative approach that delivers intelligent, connected user experiences.

Growth Mindset

For the history of oil and gas companies, growth has been the key indicator of success. Recently, the global pressure to reduce carbon footprint has switched industry focus from growth to adaptability. To survive the volatility of supply and demand in the market – regularly disrupted by political, social, and economic trends – oil and gas companies must find a way to stay agile and prepared for anything.

Alongside this necessity for flexibility and preparedness is a growing movement for the utilization of the cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), and the internet of things (IoT). These powerful tools, like Salesforce, give oil and gas companies the ability to digitize their processes, improving production, streamlining workflows, assisting in tracking and reporting, and even improving employee and customer experiences. Overall, the wise and nimble use of digital solutions in the oilfield – a.k.a. the “digital oilfield” – will help develop a sustainable business model that generates the most profit.

Utilizing CRM

For upstream, midstream, and downstream companies, utilizing a client relationship management (CRM) platform will help compile all the data necessary to manage schedules, assets, and resources in one place. This capability can improve vendor relationships, as it would share data across all assets. In addition, data and resources would be easily downloadable for offline use, enabling field workers to access information about the customer, job, tasks, and more without worrying about internet access.

Onboarding all team members across business units onto one platform improves visibility so that communication and scheduling of important events never get lost or confused. Using a portal, oil and gas companies can delegate work to the appropriate teams reaching all team members where they are, whether that’s behind a desk or in the field.

Partnering with Salesforce

Under increased pressure to comply with ever-tightening policies on environmental compliance, oil and gas companies would also benefit from a partner that can assist in tracking and reporting. Salesforce offers Net Zero Cloud, which helps reduce both costs and emissions in one seamless sustainability management solution. Salesforce helps with scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions by compiling data in real time from multiple sources, including suppliers who agree to be collaborative partners. Not only does the platform make this data auditable with easy reporting, but it also forecasts and offers recommendations on how to adjust to reach goals.

Not to mention, integrating a CRM like Salesforce allows oil and gas companies – especially downstream companies – to adopt a consumer-centric mindset. With the flexibility to adapt to supply and demand as well as stay in tune with new trends, oil and gas companies can react quickly to demands like alternative energy and EV charging stations. For example, if a downstream company needs to diversify its portfolio with alternative energy to pivot towards green business opportunities, it can more gracefully acquire and onboard a company with a platform like Salesforce.

Perficient has been recognized in Forrester Reports for its smart implementation of Salesforce in the digital transformation of companies across industries. Ignite your digital oilfield with Perficient’s Salesforce and oil and gas industry expertise.

This is a big deal

The tech landscape is always evolving. In the history of computing, there have been three major shifts that completely changed how we view technology and its usefulness to society. Those include:

1. Graphical User Interfaces
2. The Internet
3. Mobile (and social media on mobile i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more recently TikTok)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the newest shift. Whether you are shopping at a major grocery store chain, keeping up with the latest trends on your favorite social media app, or simply using an iPhone, AI is ubiquitous to your experience.

But these have largely been personal consumer experiences. Now, AI is poised to improve our communication, collaboration and productivity at work. One of the first major forays into this quest is Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Generative AI

Early introductions of AI took the form of an additional surface for search results and customer interactions. More recently, we’ve seen a new category of AI that generates outputs like written creative content, graphic design, audio tracks and more.

Bringing Generative AI in the workplace is poised to streamline more of our day-to-day activities, from live meeting intelligence to personal productivity to smarter marketing campaigns. This has the profound possibility to change how organizations and their workers approach their job duties and processes. That is… if corporations can embrace AI as a competitive advantage vs. working against it.

Related Content: Unleashing the Power of Generative AI: Transforming the Future of Content and Experiences

Generative AI at Work – Microsoft 365 Copilot

On March 16, 2023, Microsoft announced Copilot for Microsoft 365. This new set of functionality seeks to bring the power of next-generation AI to work, providing our experiences in the Microsoft 365 Apps through the power of the Microsoft Graph and AI large language models with your data. This seamless experience seeks to provide a copilot to your work experience and assist with the following:

• Increase productivity in common apps such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel
• Maximize collaboration through Outlook and Microsoft Teams
• Simplify event troubleshooting and response for Microsoft 365 administrators
• Infuse Business Data and best practices into creator tools such as Power Apps, Visual Studio, Dynamics 365 and GitHub
• Keep a company’s data estate and attack surface secure with AI-driven troubleshooting and faster incident reporting
• Boost collaboration and communication within Microsoft Viva

Does Copilot do my work for me?

No. Copilot is meant to assist us in our daily tasks. In most cases, it creates a starting point. Copilot is not intended to do the work for you. The goal is to get your preliminary draft started, provide more insights, and make it better.

AI is not perfect. In fact, it is often wrong. This is clear with both ChatGPT interactions and Copilot for Microsoft 365. But end-users can maximize the Copilot-generated outputs with the ability to Delete, Regenerate, Adjust or Keep.

Use Cases

A new tool is simply a shiny object until we get down to the use cases. Proper use cases will decide whether this is going to truly become another monumental shift or a flash in the pan. Copilot use cases are ubiquitous across Microsoft 365, Power Platform and more:

• Copilot in Word writes, edits, summarizes and creates right alongside people as they work.
• Copilot in PowerPoint enables the creation process by turning ideas into a designed presentation through natural language commands.
• Copilot in Excel helps unlock insights, identify trends or create professional-looking data visualizations in a fraction of the time.
• Copilot in Outlook can help synthesize and manage the inbox to allow more time to be spent on actually communicating.
• Copilot in Teams makes meetings more productive with real-time summaries and action items directly in the context of the conversation.
• Business Chat brings together data from across documents, presentations, email, calendar, notes and contacts to help summarize chats, write emails, find key dates or even write a plan based on other project files.
• Copilot in Power Platform will help developers of all skill levels accelerate and streamline development with low-code tools with the introduction of two new capabilities within Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents.
• Copilot for Security will aggregate Microsoft Sentinel security data and correlate alerts from virtually any source with intelligent security information and event management (SIEM); prevent and detect attacks across your identities, apps, email, data, and cloud apps with extended detection and response (XDR) via Microsoft Defender and help mitigate threats to devices, protect corporate data, and improve compliance across all cloud and on-premises endpoints with Microsoft Intune.
• Copilot for Sales promises to move deals forward, provide deeper customer intelligence and enrich the customer experience through integrations with Viva Sales, Power Virtual Agents, Customer Insights, and Dynamics 365 (Marketing, Customer Service, Supply Chain Management and Business Central)
• More to come including Dynamics/CRM 365, Viva, Loop, Nuance, and more…

What about Ethics and AI?

Copilot follows the larger Microsoft privacy rules and regulations. Microsoft 365 Copilot does not use customer data – including prompts – to train or improve its large language models. Microsoft believes the customers’ data is their data. Existing Microsoft guarantees for enterprise and commercial data persist and continue. This is especially important in this new era of AI. Follow this link to review Microsoft’s privacy policy and service documentation for more information.

Microsoft recently revised its responsible AI standards and general requirements. See this link for the for details. Microsoft summarizes it’s stance as follows:

Microsoft is committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are helping our customers use our AI products responsibly, sharing our learnings, and building trust-based partnerships. For these new services, we provide our customers with information about the intended uses, capabilities, and limitations of our AI platform service, so they have the knowledge necessary to make responsible deployment choices.
Microsoft Responsible AI Standard v2 General Requirements

Copilot Availability

Copilot comes in a few different flavors. Each of these variations have their town timeline.

• Copilot for GitHub – available now.
• Copilot for Power Apps – currently available in the United States and English language by signup
• Copilot for Microsoft 365 – currently testing Microsoft 365 Copilot with 20 customers, including 8 in Fortune 500 enterprises. We will be expanding these previews to customers more broadly in the coming months and will share more on new controls for IT admins so that they can plan with confidence to enable Copilot across their organizations…We will share more about pricing and details in the coming months
• Copilot for Sales – Copilot for Viva Sales is available now. Deeper feature for Dynamics 365 Customer Service are in limited preview and waitlisted. Additional features mentioned in this article are also in preview.
• Copilot for Security – Microsoft Security Copilot is currently in preview and not yet generally available. Sign up for Microsoft Security updates to learn about product announcements, security insights, and upcoming events.

Ready to Reimagine Your Employee Experience?

Our dedicated Microsoft Modern Work practice brings the best expertise in the industry. From M365 Strategies to Intelligent Intranet to Microsoft Teams to Microsoft Viva, our consultants are here to ensure your success.

As a designated Modern Work Microsoft Solutions Partner and Viva Early Adopter, our Microsoft Partner Advisory Council and Partner Program contributions along with our 20+ years of delivering employee experiences to our clients means we seek to build the best strategy for your organization.

Microsoft introduces the next chapter of Microsoft Teams

Today, March 27, 2023, Microsoft announced the New Microsoft Teams desktop client. This new version of Teams promises to address customer challenges regarding ease of use, reliability, and overall performance. It will be available via Public Preview in March 2023 and generally available later this year.

NOTE: These updates are for desktop only. This update does not affect the Teams mobile client. No major changes are planned for the mobile client at this point.

Read more below on what the benefits are and who the best candidates are for the new Microsoft teams.

End-User Benefits: Speed & Performance

The new Microsoft Teams is built for speed and collaboration. Improvements to the user interface will allow for improved switching between accounts and tenants. The new version will also unlock more speed and performance benefits for end users. These benefits will include the following:

• Speed
  • 3x faster installation times
  • 2x faster app launch
  • 2x faster meeting join times
  • 7x faster chat and channel switching
• Performance
  • 50% less memory usage
  • 70% less disk space

IT Benefits: Security & Management Enhancements

IT administrator benefits enable more security and manageability enhancements for IT administrators such as:

• Improved meeting quality
• Partial data model to improve screen rendering
• Streamlined app installation through Microsoft Intune and MSIX
• Reduced network and disk space usage
• Hardened security, including Trusted Types and stronger Content Security Policy,

A Bit of Caution for Heavy Teams Users

Although this newer, zippier version of Microsoft Teams brings tons of benefits, there are also some drawbacks worth calling out. Currently, the new Microsoft Teams has not reached feature parity with the current desktop client.

While first-party apps such as SharePoint, Office, Microsoft Viva and others work as expected, some third-party and custom apps may not. These will be mitigated on a case-by-case basis, however if you organization has custom SPFx web parts and apps in Teams tabs, these will not work immediate and will need to be investigated. Also, organizations using Teams App templates should also defer this update for later.

Ideal Candidates for the New Microsoft Teams

The best candidates for the new Microsoft Teams desktop client are those using Microsoft Terms for basic collaboration scenarios such as chat and meetings. Organizations using mostly windows machines will have a better experience (initially) as support for Mac OS is coming soon. Supported versions of Windows include Windows 10: version 10.0.18800 or higher and Windows 11: version 22000.856 or higher.

How Do I get Started?

The Microsoft Teams will be available via Publix Preview in March 2023, Targeted Release in April 2023, and General Availability later this year. Once enabled within the Microsoft Teams update management policy settings, users may switch to the new experience from a toggle in the Teams user interface.  They may also switch back via the same toggle as long as the app has not been abled by default.

Microsoft has provided tons of resources for getting started on the journey to the new Teams Client. These resources range from feedback and roadmap information to technical, end-user, and adoption considerations. Check out the list of getting started resources below:

• Unlocking the Power of Microsoft Teams: Benefits of the New Architecture: check out the new Microsoft Teams architecture
• Microsoft Teams technical documentation: access technical documentation, including step-by-step instructions on how to roll out the new Teams
• End-user documentation: access end-user guidance, including instructions on how to try the new Teams
• Microsoft’s adoption tools: support users who switch to the new Teams
• Microsoft 365 Blog and Microsoft Teams Tech Community Blog:
  read the new Teams announcements
• Microsoft 365 roadmap: learn about upcoming Teams releases
• Microsoft Teams Feedback portal: send suggestions to improve the new Teams experience
• Release documentation for both Microsoft Teams in Public Preview and Targeted release

Ready to Reimagine Your Employee Experience?

Our dedicated Microsoft Modern Work practice brings the best expertise in the industry. From M365 Strategies to Intelligent Intranet to Microsoft Teams to Microsoft Viva, our consultants are here to ensure your success.

As a designated Modern Work Microsoft Solutions Partner and Viva Early Adopter, our Microsoft Partner Advisory Council and Partner Program contributions along with our 20+ years of delivering employee experiences to our clients means we seek to build the best strategy for your organization.