Melville Thomson's Blog : Events

How Creative are You With System Designs ?

Melville — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 19:53:33 GMT

It seems a strange question, last year we started DesignIT this is a design competition.for charity. Last year it was a great success the aim is to design a solution to benefit a charity in the UK. We will make sure the winning design is implemented up to a value of £15,000. A lot of you spend an enormous amount of time working for a charity. With this competition you can help much more. All you need to do is send us a system design that will improve the IT infrastructure of a charity. The entries can be formal or a sketch and can include more than just Microsoft technologies.

The ten most innovative solutions will be turned into artwork, to be exhibited in a top London gallery. The top five entries will be put to a public vote to establish the winner. To view some examples of DesignIT submissions look here. To find out how to enter the competition follow the link. If you don't work with a charity you can still enter. We have provided some real problems where you can provide the innovation.

This is a great way to highlight your favorite charity so have a go visit the site to register.

The Microsoft Technical Roadshow 2007

Melville — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 14:35:02 GMT

Hi all now that the launch event is past and we are into a new year, the next Event to look forward to is The Microsoft Technical Roadshow 2007. The show will visit 5 locations starting on the 20 Feb and finishing on the 20 Mar. There will be sessions on Vista, Office and Exchange. New for this year on the roadshow we are going to introduce an Ask the Experts section. You can come along to ask a question or listen other peoples. This session will be moderated by Phil Cross. For details on the presenters go to the Meet the Team on TechNet.

Scottish SQL User Group meeting next week (6th Dec) - Edinburgh

Melville — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 02:27:00 GMT

Hi all. Earlier this year we tried to get a Scottish User Group for SQL Server. Martin Bell has agreed to try and kick start it of again. Tony Rogerson is supporting Martin. Please come along and show your support for this. There will be a prize for the best subject idea for future sessions. If anyone wants to speak even 15 - 20 mins anything you think might be interesting.

Bring your problems or just share your experience. The evening is hosted in the Microsoft office on George Street. if you wish to attend please register, tony is hosting that through UK SQL Server group

1800 till 2130

Location
========
Microsoft Edinburgh
127 George Street
Edinburgh EH2 4JN

Directions
==========
Directions can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/about/map-edinburgh.mspxLocation
========

Microsoft at UK Oracle User Group conference

Melville — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 04:50:00 GMT

Just to bring you up to date last week I was in Birmingham at the UK Oracle User Group for three days. The rest of the team were at IT Forum in Barcelona. I was manning the Microsoft stand in Birmingham. ‘Ah’ I hear you say and I was asked several times. ‘What is Microsoft doing at an Oracle conference’? The answer is quite simple we are working together with the Oracle to support the various applications on Windows platforms.

We have created an Oracle customer information center at http://microsoft-oracle.com. This shows the level of commitment from both Microsoft and Oracle. The site has information for Oracle, Siebel, and PeopleSoft & JDE. There are Benchmarks and case studies and white papers available for each.

This is a great resource please take a look and give us some feedback.

'Introduction to Report Services' Event in Edinburgh 7 Nov

Melville — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 02:15:00 GMT

I have just got back from the TechNet Event in Edinburgh. Having it in the afternoon rather than the evening seemed to go down very well. We had to bring in extra chairs to fit everyone in.

There were a couple of questions about resources for Report Services. A lot of the white papers are located here. I was asked about deployment of Report Services and migration from Crystal Reports in particular.

I finished up with a quick demo of setting up the execution logs for the reports. The documentation for that is here

SQL Technet Events in November (UK)

Melville — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 01:33:00 GMT

We are starting to provide TechNet events around the Uk rather than just in London. so please give us feedback. Do check the details for the sessions as some of them may be during day rather than evening sessions.

07 November 2006, Edinburgh: Enhance your business’s reporting capability: An introduction to SQL Server 2005 Reporting ServicesSQL Server 2005 has a wealth of reporting services that can provide true business intelligence. This session will show you just how capable this technology is and how easy it is to set up, manage and deliver reports that will give the insights your company is looking for.

23 November 2006, Reading: Advanced SQL Server 2005 Reporting ServicesThis TechNet Event will take you to the next level of SQL reporting. See advanced techniques for building reports with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services and the Microsoft Visual Studio-based Report Designer.

27 November 2006, London: Enhance Your Business’s reporting capability: An Introduction to SQL Server 2005 Reporting ServicesSQL Server 2005 has a wealth of reporting services that can provide true business intelligence. This session will show you just how capable this technology is and how easy it is to set up, manage and deliver reports that will give the insights your company is looking for. This is a re-run of the event held in Reading on 6 September, so if you missed that or want to see those demos, please do attend this event.

An Evening of Business Intelligence - Chris Webb and Friends

Melville — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 14:01:00 GMT

Chris Webb has arranged in conjunction with Tony from UK SQL User Group. Another evening of BI fun. David Parker (MVP) will be speaking about using Visio to visualise your data. Sanjay Nayyar (IMGroup) will be talking about using Microsoft BI and Reporting services with SAP.

The event will be on Wed 29 Nov at 6pm to 9pm

Building 3
Microsoft Campus
Thames Valley Park
Reading
Berkshire
RG6 1WG
United Kingdom

For more info and to register visit http://www.sqlserverfaq.com/

BizTalk user group UK (BTUGUK)

Melville — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 16:47:00 GMT

At the meeting last month there was a draw for completeing the session evaluations, Mark Russell was the winner of some BizTalk style swag.

I just wanted to highlight some of the points Richard has raised. The next meeting will be in January more details later. He is also looking for a venue for the meeting for approx 40 people with projection facilities.

If any of you would like to shere your experiences with BizTalk please let us know. Richard is also looking for help with the website he has secured the name and has a server to host it but needs time to build the site. So if there are any voulenteers please help and it will be available quicker.

2006 PASS Community Summit

Melville — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 09:44:00 GMT

I thought I should share this with you. A great event for IT Pros and Developers in November in Seattle. November is a busy month and I can’t make this. Simon asked me a couple of weeks ago but it clashes with a previous commitment in Barcelona the same week.

The event is being held in Seattle on Nov 14 – 17, 2006 for more information please head over to www.sqlpass.org.

SharePoint 2007 and BI

Melville — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 17:10:00 GMT

This has been a busy week! I attended a TechNet event in Reading last night 20-Sept-06 On SharePoint the presenter was Nick Swan an MVP who also looks after the SharePoint User Group UK. Eileen asked me to make sure everything was ok with Nick as this was his first TechNet event for us. I also wanted to have a look and see what features for BI and Reporting have been included in the product. Do remember this is still in Beta. I really enjoyed the session and listening to you all afterwards you were blown away with all the new features. Nick has posted all the questions from the session on his blog.

When you install SharePoint SQL Express is included as a default. SQL 2005 is recommended but there is support for SQL 2000.

There is a host of features supported for BI built in out of the box. The main area is providing web and programmatic access to published Office Excel spreadsheets, ease of development of Web based BI dashboards that can incorporate rich, data-bound KPI's, Web Parts and published spreadsheets.

You can create rich BI dashboards that incorporate dynamic KPI's. There is also out of the box default websites for report access and management.

For more information on all the features go to the Microsoft Office SharePoint preview site. There is a product overview document linked from there. The Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog. is a really good resource to look at to for release information and fixes.

IMPORTANT

Before installing read http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/09/1...

The first BIZTALK USER GROUP UK (BTUGUK) Event

Melville — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 10:45:00 GMT

I had a great night last night I attended the first BTUGUK (BizTalk User Group UK) event. It was held at the Microsoft location in London. The session was hosted by Richard Blewett who I think did a great job presenting some of the new features in BizTalk 2006. He made the session interactive to find out what were the pain points and also the features that you liked. There were about 25 people who attended from as far away as Birmingham, Poole and Kent.

There were lots of offers from people to help support the next event which I think is always a good sign. We are hoping to have more events in different locations so please let us have feedback on locations and content. Richard is hoping to get a web site up and running for the user group so that you can share information but this will take a bit of time.

All the attendees left contact details with Gavin king (gking@microsoft.com) to be notified about future events. If you missed out and want to be included please contact us. The user group is independent of Microsoft but we are supporting it to help get it going.

Oracle on Windows a partnership?

Melville — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 00:42:00 GMT

An interesting thing happened to me on the way to the office today. I turned of at the beginning of Thames Valley Park into the land of Oracle. I usually drive straight past to the last roundabout so it was quite strange.

I was attending an event for the UK Oracle User Group (UK OUG) Special Interest Group for Oracle on Windows . This shows a level of interoperability between Microsoft and Oracle. James had a chance to speak about 64 bit windows even after his journey back from Africa Diving last week. I was attending to provide information and help answer any questions. This event was a re-run of highlights from an event run in Redmond in February. I have volunteered to show some of the resources for monitoring Windows servers at a future event. I had a really good day chatting to people about the technology.

Some resources for interoperability on Microsoft are located here. http://www.microsoft.com/interop/partner/oracle.mspx

Some of the tools used for monitoring and status
http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/1653a133-9254-4a5e-8627-0e104fd64e4b1033.mspx?mfr=true

Resources - 'An introduction to SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services' - Reading Event - 06 Sept

Melville — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 09:59:00 GMT

These are some resources I found to be very useful for you after the Reading event There are two webcasts then a lot of links to various information. Do look at Brian Welcker's Weblog there is lots of useful information there.

TechNet Webcast: Introduction to SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services (Level 200)
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032301587&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

TechNet Webcast: Introduction to SQL Server 2005 Report Builder (Level 200)
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032289993&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services
http://msdn.microsoft.com/sql/bi/reporting/

Direct Reports (Brian Welcker's Weblog) and the related blogs he lists on the left side.
http://blogs.msdn.com/bwelcker/,

BI solutions page
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/solutions/bi/default.mspx

Case Study information
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/casestudies/default.mspx

SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services (SSRS) product page
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/2005ssrs.mspx

SQL Server Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/sql/

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition!!
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vwd/download/

Generate Ad-hoc Reports with Microsoft Reporting Services 2005
http://www.devx.com/dbzone/Article/28047/1954?pf=true

Prologika forums info on reporting
http://prologika.com/CS/files/5/articles/default.aspx

Access User Group - Info

Melville — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 11:12:00 GMT

Hi Derek http://www.workerthread.com brought this to my attention. So I thought I would give it a mention it is the website of the UK Access User Group http://www.ukaug.co.uk/. They do have some information on SQL Express on the site. I have been asked to present a session at an event for them later in the year. I will give you more details nearer the time. The session will probably be interoperability with SQL Server and Access.

There is a regional meeting on Wednesday 20th Sept in Cambridge see the link to the site above.

Announcing the new independant BizTalk User Group - 19 Sept 18:00 London

Melville — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 01:56:00 GMT

I would love to share this with you there is a new independent BizTalk user group starting in the UK. This is independent from Microsoft although we are supporting the development by hosting it at our London location. The main user focus is architects, developers or technical decision makers from end user organisations.

The event
Is on 19 Sept 2006 18:00 – 21:00 registration is from 1730. The location is at:
Microsoft House, Great Poultney Street, London

Richard Blewett (MVP) is an independent consultant working with .NET and enterprise systems Will be starting things off. As well as some planned content there will also be a bit of fun. I registered today easily you need a passport account and to validate your email address.

 Register on the web: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-GB&eventid=1032306624
 Register by phone: 0870 166 6680 Ref 6624

If you have any questions about this event please contact Gavin King (gking@microsoft.com) for more information – we are looking forward to seeing you at the event.