Operations

My colleague Brad Nunnally from our XD practice has an interesting talk submitted for SXSW focused on the complexity of making choices and how it can drive customer engagement. Brad speaks extensively at conferences and events on UX related topics and is one of the authors of ‘Designing the Conversation: Techniques for Successful Facilitation (Voices […]

In my last post in this series, I described the basics of Data Services within Microsoft’s Windows Azure public cloud platform.   Basically, we were able to somewhat exclude the majority of PaaS offerings in Azure and home in on the IaaS offering:  Azure Virtual Machines. Azure VM’s are effectively the only real path to full-fledged […]

In recent weeks, I’ve been seeing an uptick in aggression from SharePoint’s would-be competitors, and I suppose that makes sense.  Microsoft’s do-it all platform for collaboration, social business, intranets and extranets, content management, enterprise search, business intelligence and whiskey distillation—okay, maybe not the whiskey, but everything else and then some—is pretty much ubiquitous in large […]

Forrester Research last week published a report on SharePoint, Yammer, and Microsoft’s direction for the two.  I’ve always found the analysis put about by the likes of Forrester and Gartner to be far more important than the common buzz that gets tweeted and blogged around the internet because, bottom line, their material targets CIOs outright.  […]

I recently started playing tennis again after a long absence from the game.  My son is just learning how to play and I want to be able to play with him as he gets older. While I played tennis in (high) school in Ireland, I was never a particularly strong individual player – I had […]

Recently, I finished development on a SharePoint 2013 provider-hosted app that uses Keyword Query Language and the SharePoint Search API to run asynchronous queries against a site collection to grab all of the site collections under that domain name. What I found almost most troubling was figuring out a way not just to display these […]

The velocity of release for Microsoft development and infrastructure products can be at times overwhelming, especially if you’re trying to keep up. Microsoft has done something to help reduce the time to get the new offerings up and running. On Windows Azure they provide several pre-configured images to allow you to get started using the […]

Claire Marshall  recently posted on IBM’s Smarter Conference blog an article titled “5 ways to personalize your site content via IBM Marketing Center“. In the post, she talks about the following ways to personalize your site: Greeting – if you know the person’s first/last name then display it on the page Referring Site – if […]

I know that this isn’t a healthcare blog, but I think it’s important to provide some context on the healthcare industry in order to make connections between it and financial institutions.  Last week I started the discussion around health reform and I’d encourage you to revisit my previous blog post.  Healthcare reform is really health […]

Perficient recently worked with Marshfield Clinic to implement SharePoint 2013 as the engine for its new website. The Marshfield Clinic system is the largest private group medical practice in Wisconsin and one of the largest in the United States, long known for its clinical excellence, programs in research and education, and involvement in the community it serves. […]

This article was pointed out to me by a colleague, and I found it a pretty compelling read:  How Microsoft helped this bar figure out that vodka was costing it a fortune. Of particular interest to me is the Natural Q&A feature, which is mentioned prominently. Now, my time in the data warehousing trenches tempers my […]

Trying to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to IT issues is a challenging task. Emerging technology forces in the financial services industry are already impacting business. The convergence of these forces does present challenges; however, it also provides a window of opportunity for financial institutions to elevate business performance and gain a […]