On Monday 15th April in Thames Valley Park, we are running another Sales Specialist Training day for BI. The morning of this session focuses on the Microsoft BI stack and how to sell it, including the competitive landscape. Then attendees take the SSA...

Some of you may know that I've written a couple of books. The first, Child of the Hive , is a sci-fi adventure set in near-future England. The second is the hugely exciting Designing Forms for SharePoint and InfoPath . I have written another sci-fi...

Happy New Year! Picking up where I left off last year, I’m going to talk about another change in SharePoint 2013 that I think is worth shouting about. This is one of those areas where I got disproportionally excited about a new feature: you can...

The Content Search Web Part is a new web part in SharePoint 2013 that lets you bring together data from across SharePoint into a single view. For example, you might have a page on your intranet for engagements with a particular customer. You can use the...

SharePoint 2013 brings in Machine Translation Services, which provides automatic content translation or packages up content in a standard format for human translation. For the automated translation, it uses a cloud-based translation service, sending content...

In MOSS 2007 and SharePoint Server 2010, it’s technically possible to set up an environment so that some users have the SharePoint Standard CAL and some users have the Enterprise CAL. Note the word “technically.” In order to get it to...

Access Services is an interesting topic in the 2013 context. When this was described to me, my first reaction was, “but we could do that in 2010.” Then you scratch the surface and discover that everything has changed under the hood. The...

I’ve been spending this week learning about SharePoint 2013 on the Ignite training. Partly in an effort to get this knowledge to stick in my brain, I’m going to be writing a series of blog posts on some of the topics covered that struck me...

I've touched on this topic before but it's worth another mention because there's been a recent white paper on the subject. The whitepaper talks about how to deploy SharePoint Server on Windows Azure Virtual Machines. It starts with a clear and concise...

Starting on the 3rd September, Microsoft are running a Business Intelligence Practice Accelerator. This is an online training offering for partners around building a BI practice and delivering our BI technologies. This is a new structure of Practice Accelerator...

Kamal Hathi, Microsoft Director of SQL Server Business Intelligence, will be delivering the keynote at the SQLRally event in Copenhagen from 1st to 3rd October 2012. The agenda is available on the SQL PASS website, including the pre-conference activities...

In the previous post in this series (sorry for the delay), I talked about the Client for DQS. It seems appropriate then that I introduce the desktop client for MDS. In this case, the client is Excel, through a freely-downloadable add-in that runs in Excel...

A company called Share Squared are running a competition to win a full conference pass to the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2012 in Las Vegas this November. There are other prizes, including SharePoint Composer, an Xbox 360 and Starbucks gift cards...

The PointBeyond blog recently posted an interesting piece on running SharePoint on Azure. This piece covers setting up a virtual machine environment on Azure for running a Multi-Server SharePoint Farm. The post can be found here and is useful reading...

Sometimes there are measures which have an intrinsic order to them, such as days of the week or month of the year. However, this order is not always known by the technology being used to represent data by those values. For example, if I was to create...

This is the first video I've done on Data Quality Services. It shows how to get started with DQS by creating a new knowledge base and running knowledge discovery on a sample data set.

Data Quality Services, introduced in the previous blog post , includes two main components: DQS Server and DQS Client. There’s also a DQS Cleansing transformation included in SSIS in SQL Server 2012, but I won’t be going into that in this...

The previous two blog posts have been focusing on Master Data Services . Given the title of this series, it would be remiss of me to forget Data Quality Services, the second piece of the data quality story in SQL Server 2012. Data Quality Services is...

In the previous blog post , I introduced the concept of Master Data Management as a methodology to improve data quality by creating a “master” version of important information. Master Data Services is Microsoft’s technology for implementing...

Data quality is important and data quality mistakes can be expensive. Imagine a situation where a company has two systems, each with their own data set. One system is for CRM, the other is a financial system. Both systems have information about customers...

Someone asked this question on a discussion list and I thought the answer was one that others might be interested in. What do you do if you want to set a field in an InfoPath form to show the month that the form is filled out? This can be done by...

Myself and colleagues (mostly Sam Solieman, but also will Thompson) have been running a series of webcasts on SQL Server 2012. The ones we've run so far have been recorded, so you can watch them on demand. The recordings are on the Partner Learning Center...

The SQL Server team blog has posted recently about customers using SQL Server 2012 today . This post has five case studies of big customers who are on the early adopters programs for SQL Server, putting to use the new features of SQL Server 2012.

This nice video has people giving their comments on their favourite features of SQL Server 2012.

I'm going to be speaking at the International SharePoint Conference in London on 23rd to 25th April. My subject is: No Budget, No Time, No Permissions. It's a case study of building a SharePoint site with no allocated resources. Come along to find out...