Featured Article(s)
SharePoint Custom Solution Deployment: approach to more maintainable implementations
There are many features that come out of the box with SharePoint. However, more often than not – we need to tweak few things and create our own addition or few to our standard deployment. Depending on the complexity of your custom components, you may have just a simple feature or a collection of features, web parts, schemas, resource files and many other supporting bits and pieces that contribute to your overall solution. In this article we’re going to take a look at the recommended approaches for your custom solution deployment to ensure seamless solution installation and upgrade.
BI For the Masses
(My term, not Microsoft’s) – had a great conversation today with Donald Farmer from Microsoft. He was talking about the work Microsoft is doing for Business Intelligence specifically to move further toward to BI for the end-users out there, or at least providing additional tools for them. While BI has made huge in-roads with Excel connectivity directly to the database, there are clearly still holes to fill on several fronts when it comes to usability and empowering the end-users. (Note: I’ve always hated that word, "empowering.")
I can’t wait. I have to say, I think BI as a general direction is where collectively we’ll be working in general. If databases are stable, running, recoverable and working well, we’ll have more time to focus on building great accessible solutions that people can use to get the information they need from their data stores. There is real power and value in architecting information retrieval and analysis solutions for users and management. By knowing how the database engine works, then applying that knowledge to building the solutions, you’ll be offering solid leverage.
As you work with your departments, your developers and such, make sure you’re taking a step back too and thinking about other ways the information may be used. You won’t have to identify the specific reports, but if you can think about logical groupings or presentation possibilities in the future, then think about how that may impact how you store, optimize and work with that information, you’ll be ahead of the game when it comes time to start digging through things.
I think we’ll start to see, very soon, that the time for just blindly storing data have passed. Now is the time to build out solutions that you can leverage and learn from going forward. If you don’t have a good handle on what people anticipate using your systems to understand, consider taking just a few minutes more to understand their "why." It’ll save you from scrambling later.
Weekly Show about SQL Server, Development and More
[Watch] SelectViews #126 – We had some more amazing people in the office this week and we have some great interviews. Watch the interviews with Chris Shaw, Daniel Galant, Rachel Appel and Rebecca Isserman – great information sharing!
Also Available:
[Watch] Adam Levithan, Vishal Shukla, Sarah Barela and Shannon Callaway. From SharePoint to cloud computing lessons learned, from SQL Server security to development – great information!
[Watch] This show features several tech-industry experts, here in-studio for the upcoming vConference. Eric Johnson and Josh Jones get together for a discussion, Craig Utley and Erik Veerman are also on the show.
Discussion posts – can you help?
– Convert Microsoft SQL Standard to Microsoft SQL Express?
– VM and SQL 2008 Licensing
– SQL Server giving "transport error"
Featured White Paper(s)
Open Database Connectivity
Database connections are the lifeblood of enterprise applications, administrating the secure and steady flow of information b… (read more)