The Microsoft Power BI blog announced last Thursday that new features were now in Preview, and I can tell you that this is news worth seeing. Among the highlights this preview includes are: Power BI Dashboards – This configuration of the base visual approach in Power View into a coherent Dashboard interface is a smart […]
Operations
Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting Pitfalls to Avoid in 2015
Many companies struggle with creating effective, insightful budgets and forecasts. The existing processes for creating budgets and forecasts are often highly inefficient and outdated. Throughout my consulting career, I have come across several consistent mistakes that most companies make when setting up their planning, budgeting and forecasting processes. What I am sharing in this blog […]
Office 365 – SharePoint Online Public Sites – Changes Coming!
Are you a small or medium sized business using the Office 365 SharePoint Online Public Websites feature? If so, there are some important changes coming to the service. Starting in January 2015, Microsoft is making changes to the SharePoint Online Public Website feature. Customers who currently use this feature will continue to have access to […]
You Can Finally Stop Avoiding Those Horse-Sized Pills
It sounds like a funny topic, but it’s actually an unfortunate problem for many people – one in three, actually. When people struggle to swallow large pills (tablets and capsules), they tend to take less than the prescribed dose, or even avoid taking the medicine altogether. Either situation can result in making their medical conditions […]
Video How-To’s in Office 365
Video Portal was announced back in November with initial push to “first release” customers and a global deployment available by early 2015. This portal powered by Azure Media Services provides adaptive streaming optimized for video playback for the device it’s being viewed on. Leveraging Office Graph, simple drag and drop interface, discover ability across enterprise search […]
Dream Team 2014: Connecting Salesforce and SharePoint
By now, it’s old news that Salesforce is connecting to files stored in Microsoft’s SharePoint Online service, the portals-and-collaboration piece of Office 365. The official announcement may have been made this morning, but it hit the channel months ago and was unveiled with much fanfare when it was previewed at Dreamforce 2014 this fall. Since then, our Perficient team […]
Getting Started with Power BI, pt. 3
Last week, I posted part two of our Power BI Primer series discussing administration of Power BI Sites and user permissions. Today, we’re bringing you Part Three. If you are an Office365 customer, then you have almost certainly heard about (if not seen) Power BI. The cloud-based analytics and collaboration platform from Microsoft has some […]
Reference Architecture – Cloud MDM for Salesforce
In my earlier post Why MDM should be part of CRM Strategy I discussed the importance of having a MDM strategy along with the CRM initiative. Proliferation of cloud CRM solutions like Salesforce is a blessing and it can also be an IT nightmare, if it is not managed properly. In many companies Salesforce implementation […]
Bug Tracking Systems Aren’t Just For Bugs
Here in Perficient’s life sciences practice, we use a defect tracking system as part of our application development process. It helps us keep track of bugs and resolutions as we develop and test, but there’s nothing particularly remarkable about it…except that we use it for another purpose too: to track problems with our QA controlled […]
Essbase Errors & Resolutions
Like many of us, I have run into several essbase errors while creating/testing/implementing new applications and scripts. Some of the errors have useful information in the log files or the error code’s description clearly reveals where the error lies, but there are those codes which provide little to no information or the accompanying error message […]
Cloud MDM – Reference Architecture for Public Cloud Platform
Moving the MDM deployment to a cloud platform involves several considerations ranging from technical gotchas to getting the internal buy-in. Getting the buy-in is a different topic of discussion – see my earlier posts on Data Governance. The advantages of moving to cloud eliminates some of the administrative and server farms related maintenance tasks but […]
Cloud Fact Or Fiction: Can You Always Access Your Clinical and Safety Data In The Cloud?
Last time, we concluded that the costs associated with hosting clinical trial software in the cloud can actually be less than for on-site solutions. In this post, we’ll tackle access to data and system uptime. Claim #4: Clinical or safety data stored in the cloud can be accessed at any time. Fact or fiction? Fact. […]