Saturday, April 23, 2005 6:33 PM
It'll Be Cool
I'm Brian Welcker, Group Program Manager for SQL Server Reporting Services. I was doing a webast last week on the new Report Viewer controls in Visual Studio 2005 and during the question and answer phase, someone asked me if the sample code would be on my blog. My response was that I didn't have a blog. Then I though "why not?" I have always loved to write and I spend lots of times answering questions on the newsgroups. I think I simply felt like I couldn't do a "proper" blog. I'm not one to do things halfway and I never felt I could post with any reasonable frequency. Nonetheless, I'll do my best to keep you up to date on what's going on with me and my areas of interest.

Most of the contents here will be about the product I work on, SQL Server Reporting Services. If you haven't given it a try, I would encourage you to do so. I will might throw in a little music, politics, or games (I have a level 45 paladin in the Dragonblight realm of WOW). Don't look to me for lots of code samples (it's been close to 10 years since I've written production code) but I'll try to give you some tips and tricks and some insight into the innerworkings of Microsoft product development. If you have specific topics you would like me to blog about, feel free to suggest them.

Chris Hays's Reporting Services Sleazy Hacks Weblog
http://blogs.msdn.com/ChrisHays/

Thursday, July 15, 2004 6:00 PM
Welcome to my Reporting Services Sleazy Hacks blog

Who are you?
I'm the guy who gets to take the credit and/or blame for designing the Report Definition Language (RDL).

What is this blog?
This is my warehouse for RDL tips, tricks, sleazy hacks and answers to frequently asked questions.

When will the blog be updated?
Whenever I get around to it.

Where can I ask questions?
The reporting services newsgroup: microsoft.public.sqlserver.reportingsvcs

Why a blog?
I post topics here based on common or interesting questions I answer on the newsgroup so I can direct people here if I've answered it before.

Posted Thursday, July 15, 2004 6:00 PM by ChrisHays | (Comments Off)

Tuesday, October 11, 2005 6:56 PM
Welcome to BIMVP - Business Scorecard Manager 2005
This blog is an online journal to share thoughts, ideas, gripes, project status, or anything about Microsoft's Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005.   Please feel free to contribute in the forums and send us white paper or success stories of your implementations.  If you have an article you would like to post, please contact us and we can talk about it.  The more we all contribute, the more value we will get out of this BI Community.

We decided to create a blog/community to not only find assistance when we need it, but to assist others in utilizing BSM05 for their internal Business Performance Management projects.

Lots of information to come, whitepapers, projects completed, sample scorecard templates and more!

Enjoy

Patrick Husting
PS:  Setting up one of these Community Web sites is very time consuming!  :o)

Nick Barclay's BI Blog
Musings on Microsoft Business Intelligence and other stuff.
http://nickbarclay.blogspot.com/

22 September 2005
The very first post!
OK, so here we go - my very first blog post. I have learned so much from other people's blogs during the last year, I felt it was about time I made a contribution to the Blogosphere myself.

This blog will be mainly focused on the fast evolving world of Microsoft Business Intelligence. In working for an MS partner I have been given a great opportunity to see some of the fantastic things are going to be coming out of Redmond during the coming year or two. We all know that the imminent release SQL Server 2005 is going to lay the foundation for what is going to be a great platform for BI professionals. Well, there's more... and I'm looking forward to blogging about some of the cool stuff that will be appearing on the MS horizon when I am able to.

In the meantime, hope you enjoy the blog. Would love to hear any feedback anyone has.

Cheers,
Nick

The BizSharpie PerformancePoint Blog
Patrick Baumgartner's Unofficial PPS Blog
http://bizsharpie.spaces.live.com/

March 06, 2007
Getting Started
I've been promising to start a PerformancePoint blog for almost a year now - so here we go...

As the title of the blog would suggest, the content will focus on the PerformancePoint Planning (formerly known as Biz#) component of PPS. I'm hoping to call on some of my teammates on the PPS team to add some blog posts here as well so we'll also be able to span a wide variety of topics relating Performance Management and PerformancePoint. If you have any requests let me know.

December 30, 2004
Manifesto
I've made a New Year's resolution to start my own blog - after all, the world and his dog seem to have one these days - and here it is, courtesy of those generous people at MSN. The main subject for discussion will be BI (Business Intelligence) and the technologies that Microsoft have in this area; this is pretty much the only thing I can write about that might be of interest to anyone else! I'll be talking about my experiences with SQL Server 2005, issues arising from questions I answer in the microsoft.public.sqlserver.olap newsgroup, news, articles, etc.

5:14 PM | Add a comment | Read comments (1) | Send a message | Permalink | Trackbacks (0) | Blog it

Friday, September 23, 2005 7:21 AM
Let’s start with some "big" news …
Greetings.  My name is David Gainer, and I am the Group Program Manager for Microsoft Excel.  Starting today, I am joining several other members of the Microsoft Office team in sharing information about the upcoming release of Microsoft Office.  Specifically, I am going to be writing about what’s new in Excel 12 (that’s a working title, not an official name).  The Excel team is very excited about the product we are building, and I am looking forward to being able to talk about all the great work the team has been doing publicly.  I plan to write this blog from now until around the general availability of Office 12, and I am hoping to talk in some depth about all the different features we have added to Excel 12.  As things unfold, I look forward to reading your comments and hearing suggestions on what would you would like to read about. 

With that said, let’s finish this initial post with some discussion of a feature. 

Probably the most common question the Excel team gets from our customers is “when are you going to add more rows/more columns/more rows and more columns”.  There are many different scenarios behind these requests.  Some customers want to be able to analyze more data than Excel has rows, some customers want to track more daily information than Excel has columns, and other customers want to perform matrix math on large matrices of thousands of elements.  There are plenty of other scenarios too.  Well, the answer to the question is “in Excel 12.”  Specifically, the Excel 12 grid will be 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns.  That’s 1,500% more rows and 6,300% more columns than in Excel 2003, and for those of you that are curious, columns now end at XFD instead of IV. 

This is an exciting feature for us, because it is a feature that helps a very broad range of our customers, and we are looking forward to seeing what folks create with a bigger grid.

Of course, rows and columns aren’t the only things customers have been asking for more of.  Next time, I will review all of the other places where Excel 12 gives you “more”.

Published Friday, September 23, 2005 7:21 AM by David Gainer

Filed under: Overview, Rows, Columns, Performance

Establish. Execute. Evolve.™
Perspectives on Performance Management and Microsoft Business Intelligence
http://adriandownes.blogspot.com/

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Welcome!
Welcome to "Establish. Execute. Evolve."

The title is in keeping with my company's philosophy, and, the content you'll find in this blog was inspired by Nick Barclay, a good friend of mine with whom I co-authored The Rational Guide to Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005. Nick, who has been blogging for a while now on the subject of Microsoft Business Intelligence, has been quite adamant that I get out and blog myself. After much elbowing I gave in, and, what follows intends to provide perspectives on performance management & business intelligence. Although the technical content will have a general Microsoft slant (especially where Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 is concerned), the key difference between this blog and the host of others from clever people in the Microsoft BI space like Nick, Ian Tien, Darren Gosbell, Chris Webb, Jamie Thompson and others is that the content will cover fairly high-level and sometimes abstract topics-- mostly architectural / educational / career / business-value "meta-stuff" (as Nick calls it). I will, nevertheless, actively raise your awareness of other BI bloggers news, findings and musings.

More about me: I've been working in the BI space for about 10 years, focused on designing and delivering solutions with Microsoft technology. In addition to the book and my company, I also participate in the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for PerformancePoint Server 2007.

In any event, I hope you find this blog informative and helpful, if not insightful. As always, I look forward to any feedback you may have.

- Adrian Downes

Posted by Adrian Downes at 11:15 PM 0 comments  

Wednesday, August 31, 2005 11:32 AM
Welcome to the Jim and Dan Show...

This blog is from two Microsoft field technical resources with extensive Application Development and Business Intelligence experience. Our purpose here is to discuss things we have seen at our customer sites and during deployments. This is not a features

Posted by danmanr@microsoft.com | 0 Comments

Good news for customers and partners who’ve been asking for more pre-designed models for verticals on top of Business Scorecard Manager/PerformancePoint—this content is coming!

ProfitBase builds retail model for Microsoft BI

http://www.cbronline.com/article_news_print.asp?guid=D27948B0-0923-45E7-9877-39F2620DBDC1

29th May 2007

By Madan Sheina

Microsoft is partnering with Norwegian performance management specialist ProfitBase to build a turnkey business intelligence system for retailers.

ProfitBase, which is a Microsoft Gold partner, is working to create a vertical data model for retailers containing industry-specific metrics and performance indicators - like gross margin, sales per customers and turnover per working hour - that runs on Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 database platform.

Sandes-based ProfitBase said the data model adheres to XML data schemas set by the Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS).

The system is also being designed to use Microsoft's new Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 planning and dashboard software that is expected to ship next month.

ProfitBase's namesake 2007 data warehouse provides includes ready-made OLAP analysis cubes for financial and sales modules in Microsoft Dynamics' GP, NAV and AX ERP suite as well as Oracle Financials. The analysis is driven by the Analysis Services capabilities built into SQL Server 2005.