Posts Tagged ‘cloud’

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.  […]

On Wednesday we hosted a webinar that covered how and why Windows Intune can be a great solution to address growing concerns driven by the current trend towards Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to work.  Steve Andrews, a senior solutions architect in Perficient’s Microsoft infrastructure practice talked about the challenges many companies face today, often […]

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 […]

I don’t think it is well-known but it proves that Windows Azure is not just a Microsoft platform. Windows Azure supports Oracle and Java! They don’t have pre-configured images yet, though they’re planned to be available in the near future. For now to work with these technologies you have to configure your own images and […]

I’m taking a break from Lync blogging to address this…situation I’m in. So, as the title states, my contract is up and its time to run through the mobile debate once again.  If there is stress in my life right now, it isn’t the consulting work or raising 2 boys who are destined to destroy my […]

In my first post in this series, I talked a little about the basics of cloud BI and Microsoft’s Windows Azure public cloud platform.  I gave a brief glimpse of what services Azure offers for BI.   So to begin with, let’s recap the Azure data services offerings in terms of the cloud computing models available.  Azure’s […]

I talk about Windows Azure at several events, such as: SQL Saturdays, Code Camps and User Groups in my region. One thing I hear about when people sign-up is that they don’t want to supply a credit card just to try the services. Now MSDN subscribers are no longer required to provide payment information. MSDN […]

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 […]

If you have used Windows Azure Cloud Services for any length of time, one of the features you would have wanted is AutoScale. AutoScale allows you to scale your applications based on usage and performance. Being able to dynamically scale your applications based on performance and other factors is a now a reality, as AutoScale is […]

Starting with Lync Server 2010 and now with Lync Server 2013, Certificate management was much improved over previous OCS platforms with the ability to itemize certificates across the environment.  More specifically, on the Lync Server Front ends you can now apply up to 3 unique certificates to each server.  A description is provided for each certificate below: […]

If you have used Windows Azure for any length of time, one thing you should have noticed is the rate of change. When I say change, I’m not referring to things being taken away either. The change is almost always improving what already exists or adding more capabilities. The new SDK adds support for the […]