I am starting to get to grips with the announcement from Microsoft of their Mesh Cloud platform for sharing files desktops and data.

The good is that it seems to be a way of unifying a lot of disparate services that have been available before (FolderShare  Live Drive etc). It also opens up a whole new set of possibilities for building disconnected applications with a low TCO.

The bad is that it seems to still be a bit disconnected from the other MS announcements about computing in the cloud such as SQL Services Data Services.

Now the scary:

I see today that EMI are suing a company for allowing users to upload their music to the cloud and then download it to another machine. Now I may be missing the finer legal points but it seems this is exactly the same service that the “Mesh” allows.

I also have concerns when the On10 video proudly says that it traverses firewalls and NATS. Fine for home users but how does this leave an enterprise admin trying to secure corporate assets?

Interesting post from Mark Rittman on the Collaborate 08 and the intersection of the Oracle OLAP world and the Hyperion OLAP world.

What interested me was the comment that:

The room was packed - around 170 at last count, with people standing at the sides and sitting in the aisle - which is about 160 more than the average Oracle OLAP talk in previous years

There is also a lot more in the post that gives an insight to the approaches both vendors have under the hood

Whilst on the subject of service packs I have read from the excellent blog of Patrick Husting that PerformancePoint should be getting a Service Pack.

The comments indicate that this should RTM in May with 300 fixes.

I know that the feature set that will form the V2 release is now in coding and work is  going on to firm up the specs for V3 so there is a clear commitment from MS to drive the product forward. Will they get there?

EDIT

Needless to say the guys from Adatis are well ahead of me and also have a link that shows that PerformancePoint will be supported on Windows 2008.

EDIT 2

Nick Barclay has pointed to Peter Eb’s Blog which also confirms the SP1 release and some key changes to the way that the Excel add-in works with MDX (Where clauses are in On Pages are out)

I know I am late to the blog but it has been revealed that SQL Server 2005 will be getting a service pack 3! How a product that had already reached 7 cumulative updates could expect to get away without one beats me.

What I do worry about is how many of the issues that are in the cumulative updates and the forthcoming SP have been wrapped into SQL 2008 and how long that product will be held up by marketing before it gets the updates?

There is an interesting post over on the BI Blog on the “The Importance of “Familiarity” to your BI Users“.

Apart from the importance of a high availability of Brownies at conferences, Guy highlights the importance and difficulty of getting people to “use” the BI tools that CIOs are implementing.

I think that such a debate needs to take a step back and examine the definition of “use”. Too often BI solutions are being designed, pitched and implemented with a level playing field approach. The idea being “we must include the ability to do XYZ so we can appeal to the corporate enterprise analyst”. This then creates the usability issues Guy refers to.

My feeling is that the BI industry needs more segmentation rather than the current trend to all encompassing Uber applications. I also question, but have not formulated a definitive opinion, the drive to tie all BI to Excel. Yes management and accountants love Excel but is that really the extent of the user base?

I know in many implementations I have been involved with the end users knowledge of Excel is at the level of rote learning, Click this, enter that, save there. If that is all the users are doing why try and force the BI application to work and fit into this unsuitable environment?  They could just as easily learn a new application. In fact a new application freed from the constraints of Excel may be much easier and therefore cheaper and more effective to implement.

So the question remains what is the definition of “use” and should we be tying our applications to an environment that is only really used and understood by 1% (guess) of our target audience?

I have not found any better words to describe this loss than those posted on , of all places, Slashdot

The biggest addition to society that Clarke, and all other science fiction writers, have added is not in the works of fiction themselves, but the spark of imagination infused in those reading it. Some will take that spark and build their lives around it turning fiction to fact.

The world will miss him

RIP the man who gave me my dreams.

Edit His obituary in his own words

If I have given you delight
By aught that I have done,
Let me lie quiet in that night
Which shall be yours anon:
And for that little, little span
The dead are borne in mind
Seek not to question other than
The books I leave behin

Kipling
Lie quiet, Arthur for delight you have given me

Sorry another off topic post

We are where?

I came across this spoof from Channel 9. Whilst it relates to Games designers I bet we can all relate this to some application designs we have come across.

Joining the Dots has a post about how search engines can try and cope with the variety of meaning of words in language.

One of my favorite talks from TED is Erin McKean’s so I found this very interesting.

I have to say that the key feature that is keeping me locked to Google as a search engine is its Suggest page.

Chris Webb has a some posts on caching in Analysis Services and its advantages.

I spotted this post by James Rowland Jones that adds to the options “Finding when SSAS has ramped up its cache”

Unfortunately it is only a feature for Enterprise Edition SQL Server. However he has promised us a set of posts on Enterprise only features that could be the spark for some interesting debates.