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SQL Server’s presence at Convergence represents how Dynamics is committed to enabling their customers to improve business insight through the SQL Server BI platform. In addition to providing information about SQL Server 2005 and its BI technologies, the team announced several new and updated Report Packs to help customers quickly design and deploy reports.

Based on the successful release of SQL Server 2000 Report Packs (more than 147,000 downloaded), the team has released six updated and three new Report Packs for SQL Server 2005.

They are available today as a free Web download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D81722CE-408C-4FB6-A429-2A7ECD62F674&displaylang=en. 

We are also launching a new site designed to solicit customer and partner feedback: http://codegallery.gotdotnet.com/sqlrptpack  (membership is free).

Customer/Partner Benefits:

• Allow customers to kick start creating reports for applications and speed up report design and deployment
• Greater productivity and efficiency for all users from the platform to the application
• Enable partners to accelerate development of their solutions and help their customers take advantage of advanced business insight to drive business success

The 8 new/updated Report Packs include:

• SQL Server 2005 Integration Services
• SharePoint Portal Server 2003
• Internet Information Services (IIS) Logs
• Microsoft Axapta 3.0
• Microsoft Great Plains 8.0
• Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains 9.0
• Microsoft Dynamics Navision 4.0
• Financial Reporting

(re-post from Marcel's Blog in Switzerland)

Here some information from the developer-world that might also be of interest to you. AJAX (short for Async Javascript And XML technologies) allows for very nice interactive web-applications (e.g. check out the beta of Windows Live Mail on http://ideas.live.com/), but in my opinion it's quite hard to implement. This is why I find the "Atlas" news from our msdn-colleagues interesting:

The ASP.NET team has just released the March CTP for ASP.NET codename "Atlas," a set of new Web development technologies that integrate client script libraries with the ASP.NET 2.0 server-based development framework. In addition, "Atlas" offers the same type of development platform for client-based Web pages that ASP.NET offers for server-based pages. And because "Atlas" is an extension of ASP.NET, it is fully integrated with server-based services. "Atlas" makes it possible to easily take advantage of AJAX techniques on the Web, and enables you to create ASP.NET pages with a rich, responsive UI and server communication. However, "Atlas" isn't just for ASP.NET. You can take advantage of the rich client framework to easily build client-centric Web applications that integrate with any back-end data provider.

Andreas

You find the Microsoft Security Bulletin for February, 2006 here, it covers 2 critical and 5 important updates. Read the Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification about the March bulletin here.