There are so many things coming out of the Microsoft PDC that I am finding it hard to keep up so this is my first post listing some of the things that have come out so far:

Office 14 New online version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. These will be cross platform cross browser lightweight versions of the core Office components that will be available in the “cloud” or in a hosted/on Site SharePoint environment as well as being available on a phone (I am assuming a Windows Mobile device) Channel 9 video here (9 min for the demo) There is lots of talk about collaboration and the mobile options that are raised are very powerful especially for us at Aspective where our Vodafone links really count.

The next great feature is that they have included the ability to have multiple concurrent users of a document. I cannot say how much pain this will take away.

One thing I am disappointed at is that InfoPath is not included in the scenarios. I have encountered a number of real world scenarios where people want and need a form solution that InfoPath could clearly fulfill but it is ruled out because of the cost and complexity of deploying a SharePoint Forms server solution to a public/semi private facing site.

Windows 7. Lots of talk about the UI PC Pro has lots of coverage here and there is a screen shot slide show here. if you want the news from the source this post from the Windows Team covers a lot of the key points

On a more technical level Channel 9 has an interview with Mark Russinovich here. Most of Mark’s interview goes over my head but still interesting. It seems that a lot of deep down tweaking is going on in the kernel to improve multi core performance (Over 8 CPUs and up to 256. Now that’s forward thinking!)  and even got Dave Cutler involved. There is also a discussion on User mode scheduling which highlighted a key advantage the likes of SQL Server has in being part of the same global company. Namely that the Windows kernel team clearly work with the SQL team to drive performance. Not, I suspect, something Oracle can do. Also mentioned is a parallel plug and play boot process and yet more pre-fetch/ready boost, better battery life by letting processor cores sleep in preference to just ticking over. T

The final 15 mins goes into how deeply complex Windows has become and how the work is going on the concept of minWin is going. minWin is the code name for the work on developing a core version of Windows that can be isolated from the “nice to have” bits and allow Microsoft to really get to work on a component based version of Windows. That’s a 25Mb on disk core. When they get all of this sorted out then we will see the fastest evolution of Widows ever as it will mean that individual sub systems can be upgraded without having to spend ages worrying about inter-dependencies.

Finally in the last 6 mins there is announcements that you will be able to mount and create Virtual Hard disks (VHD) natively in Windows. VHDs become first class items in Windows. You can even boot windows from a VHD. This has potentially  huge implications for me in the pre-sales arena where we run virtual machines all the time as well as for setting up development and test environments.

More  next ……

Way back at the Microsoft Partner Conference I saw a short demo of RSInteract. This is a totally web based report building tool that sits over SQL Server Reporting Services (2000/5)  and I was impressed.

Today I had a web demo of it again including the new OLAP report building in the new release. As always in a demo there is a lot to take in but some of the things I really liked were:

• It is very light weight being a pure web app.
• The ability to edit an existing report is very easy.
• The user can preview the changes without having to commit them.
• Multiple combinations of tables and graphs can be built into one report. This is a really nice feature.
• The functionality and UI has been broken up in a nice easy to understand manner.
• None of the underlying Reporting Services power and functionality has been lost. It is just made easier.

The down sides to this silver bullet of report writing are:

• It does not use the report models for relational data sources. You have to create and expose views for the end user.
• there is an additional cost over and above SQL Server Licences. That said when compared to other ad-hoc report builders in the market it is still cheap with what appears to be much greater functionality.

I have just installed it and will be evaluating it myself over the coming week so more later.

Does anyone have any experiance with this product or something similar for comparison?

Thanks to Brian for pointing out this excellent post on Reporting Services 2005 best practices.

It also contains a good range of sample code for achieving some nice features. I haven’t got through it all and I suspect that there are a number of other equally good posts on the site to explore.

I must make time to clean up some of my content and post it. Maybe next week!

There is the fourth and final draft of this tool now available at gotdotnet

I haave not read it yet but I will do.

Just been trawling through the postings by Tech Ed visitors and found these which are worth noting.

Andrew Connell points out that the Office Web Components are not being advanced anymore in favor of the Office Server components that will  give server based spreadsheet type functionality.

Federal Developer points out to new BizTalk documentation and samples

This post has a great list of  Sharepoint 2007 Web Parts. I particularly like the content aggregation parts that show lists of content and sites the user is a member of. Oh and all the cool KPI stuff of course. Thanks to Ian Morrish and Bill English for the pointer

This report from the BBC is about an ex-champion jockey being charged with conspiracy to defraud.

The BI angle come towards the end;

"In early 2004, Betfair, an internet betting exchange, brought to the attention of the Jockey Club a number of what they considered to be irregular betting patterns."

Now Betfair must handle tens of thousand or even hundreds of thousand transactions a day so they must have some very high powered analysts and software. I would love to know how they do it but I suppose the secrecy is part of its power.

SQLIS.Com have 3 new adaptors for SSIS that read as being very useful.

A Regular Expression transformation. Very useful if you are into RexEx (not me unfortunately) or even if you just cut and paste a published one (Thats Me)

A Data Generator Source. Now why didn’t I think of that! It will provide a source of random numbers or strings as specified so you can simulate the existence of the real data source in development and testing

A Trash Destination. In the same way as the generator simulates a source this can simulate a destination.

I was going to email this straight to our IT guys but my ISP is playing silly buggers with my vpn AGAIN!

Scott pointed to this cool tool called Invirtus VM Optimizer that will get control of Virtual machine hard disk sizes. As we live by VMware and Virtual PC images this could be super useful.

At the end of the live meeting we were able to download a PDF of the slides including those with the screen shots.

Now I cant see anything restricting their distribution so here are some screen shots of the screen shots.

A score card hosted in the PerformancePoint Server – maybe Sharepoint is not required

Decompose a measure to expand its source

A Proclarity screen driven from the decomposition

Performance Point addin in Excell 2007. There is a new term “Assignments”

Downloading an Assignment which has a status – presumably related to the workflow

A score card in excel 2007 with lots of fancy “heat maps”

A Forecast entry in Excel 2007. The yellow is for entering forecasts. These can be formula. Everything can have the formatting assigned

The Business Modeler showing multiple cubes and links to cubes.

The security settings inn Business Modeler.

EDIT If anyone wants the PDF slides then drop me a line. With thee release of the product Some of the screens and information in the slides may be out of date. Instead I would recommend checking out the official site for everything (almost) you wanted to know. If you still really really want the PDF then I can dig it out for you.

I dont know how I have missed this site http://sqlserveranalysisservices.com.

It looks like it as some good articles on SQL Server Analysis Services and is a Microsoft site should be a better authority that the last one I pointed to!

Thanks to Prologika for the pointer.