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...

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...

This video continues my series of short Microsoft Business Intelligence demos. Here I introduce SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS, in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. I show how to perform a simple data import from a flat file to a SQL database. ...

With the recent changes to the Partner Network, there is some confusion among partners around what is required to get the Silver and Gold competencies in some areas. On Tuesday 1st March, at 4pm GMT, I will be running a webinar entitled Get to Gold. This...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

The Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 is open for registration. This is a major Microsoft event allowing experts to share their experience and knowledge. Sessions will range from the high level business presentations to deeply technical discussions...

Because I know you don’t get enough of SharePoint during the week, I’m pleased to announce SharePoint Saturday. SharePoint Saturdays are events held on a Saturday about SharePoint (hence the name). They are educational, informative and...

Who used to play with lego? I did. We had boxes of the stuff. Lego is such a fantastic toy because it has so much potential. If you give someone a box full of mixed lego bricks, they could build just about anything . But sometimes that freedom seems...

Checking in at every station between St Pancras and Delft The girls' room. The smallest of the rooms and we still have two beds each. We discovered why this was a geek camp and not a jock camp. Apart from Mel, who scored five times....

Playing on the assault course. Spotting a suspiciously familiar building at the university (it looks very much like the Central Hall where I went to uni - just stretched) The view from the tallest building in Delft. Geeks in...

Hacking is tiring work. Coding with chords. Hacking the bike. Playing with rafts again. It was bound to happen sooner or later. The bike hack in action. Prizes for the hacks - including wedding China

Playing board games until 2am. Exploring Delft by canoe. Translating the menu. Exploring by foot. On the train to Amsterdam for Queensday. Funfair in front of the palace. Starting to get busy. ...

The Escher museum Exploring the Hague Toasting stuff over the fire. Unfortunately, we've got to come home tomorrow.

This isn’t nearly as common a myth as some of the others I’ve described so far in this series. Compared to most of the big players in this space, SQL Server is very low priced. The list prices for our competitors in this space tend to be about...

BI is a big opportunity for partners. Gartner recently released analysis of the BI market and found that spending on BI and analytics software had increased by 13.4 per cent in 2010. This is a huge jump, particularly considering the tight budgets worldwide...

There is a new training offering for partners on Business Intelligence. The Practice Accelerator is a technical learning offering, delivered in a series of webinars over 4 days, giving 16 hours of online training in total. As well as this, the offering...

There is a new Product Guide available for SQL Server Codename Denali, the next version of SQL Server. This product guide includes PowerPoint decks, technical whitepapers, datasheets, demonstrations and more. If you want to see what's coming in the...

There are some stories and myths around SQL Server. Like a lot of myths, these stories may have some origins in truth, but that doesn’t mean they are true now. This series of blog posts will address some of the key myths and give you the facts around...

This is a myth that Microsoft have been fighting against for years. Some bad history has left us with a reputation that we’ve been struggling to overcome ever since. To get over this history, Microsoft have come up with procedures around security...

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...