The turnout was smaller than usual!
Maybe the topic was more suited to the SQL Server user group!
First the news then the demo on Performance Point which will mean more business for companies who write cubes!
Office 2003 service pack 3 is out!
Office DevCon is coming at Microsoft over the weekend of 3 and 4th of November.
Bit like a code camp
Adam couldn’t stop talking about facebook and how much time he spends on it.
They even track how long staff use facebook as he is worried they might get as addicted as he is.
Simple things like seeing who has the fastest broadband connectivity or who has travelled the most etc…..
Cool sites were mentioned like trailfire.com where you can make a trail of your searching along with comments.
Useful? An example was looking up info on css and seeing the trail to sites with good info.
One could also use this to make a trail of places you are going to see…Good for travellers?
There’s a free High Performance Computing event this Friday at the MLC Centre.
This is by Frank Chism, world expert in high performance computing, discuss the future of cluster server technology
Frank admits to "over 40 years in HPC" and is "not looking to leave any time soon because I couldn't afford the cool toys I get to play with if I have to buy them myself."
Andrew Coates from Microsoft also talked about the OpenXML standard going to ISO…
There are some links regarding this and what was funny was how they even held events in New Zealand to explain this in more detail but the Kiwis rejected the proposal and we discussed is that because they are so anti-american?
The OpenXML standard apparently is more flexible than ODF and standardises even the older Microsoft office formats.
For more information goto:
openxmlcommunity.org/
openxmldeveloper.org/
Those who follow second life will like the inline protest of ibm staff against the 50 virtual offices that ibm runs as the profit has gone up but their bonuses have gone down!
workers-shape-up-for-big-blue-with-ibm
techcrunch.com/ - IT news – has rss feeds….
iScrybe for online calenders was mentioned as worth taking a look
They explained that SSW workers only do things if they get an email…talk about an inbox nightmare!
They didn’t want to use outlook as it was a problem with people coming and going…..
So they asked a business person to come up with a way to email monthly/quarterly tasks to staff and Google Calendar got a good wrap as it allows sending to many and can be shared easily.
You can even write code to talk with Google Calendar.
What I found perplexing was they mentioned SharePoint but then dished that as not be easy to set up re-occurring tasks!
From my view point their requirement is a little crude as one likes to know if a task has been completed and this didn’t seem to be their business requirement!
Performance Point:
There are three different parts to this.
M A P
M – Monitor / KPIs – based on Business ScoreCard Manager…
A – Analyse – They bought pro-clarity and what a Kool tool! ….This alone is worth it!
P – Planning (Planning/ Forecasting/Budgeting etc) from BizSharp – have yet to see anything about this but the business users like this part!
The main competitors are: Business Objects / Cognos and Hyperion.
At about 20K USD and $200USD per user, one of the guys from CBA where they use this said that was a good price.
Business Objects drill through isn’t as good…
Cognos is used by many in a similar way that reporting services is used….
There are guys at Microsoft who only deal in one of these three areas..and Adam only walked us through a canned demo of the first two.
So this is the new Hyperion Killer – Hyperion is a great tool, Ajaz enabled and using Bindows.net which is a very cool bit of Ajax technology that has been around for a few years.
Performance Point should lift the demand for SQL Server cubes being built although it can query normal odbc sources….
It works with SharePoint and was annoyed at Adam’s comment that you need Moss when it states either wss3 or moss!
It even states Office 2003 in the requirements…
This will be released soon so we should see the final specifications then.
The target market is decision makers and Ceos and Operational Managers will go gaga over this!
Regards,
Tom Bizannes
Sydney, Australia
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
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