Everyone knows that the SQL Server is greatest database management, analysis system and data warehousing solutions, but a range of solutions have special spotlight.

This is SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) !!! An important SQL Server component.

If you not know SSAS, this is a great opportunity to get quality information with several articles about SSAS in the TechNet Wiki. 

Let's meet some articles about these resources now:

Tabular Model

- Tutorial: Create Charts, Tiles, and Other Visualizations in Project Crescent

- A Practical Example of How to Handle Simple Many to Many Relationships in Power Pivot/SSAS Tabular Models

Multidimensional Model

- Understanding Multidimensional Model Objects in Power View

- Currency Conversion in SSAS 2012 (Multidimensional & Tabular)

Data Mining

- System Stored Procedures for All Model Types (Data Mining)

- SSAS: Explaining the State Transitions Viewer for Sequence Clustering

PowerPivot

- Power Pivot Overview

- PowerPivot Version Compatibility

Server Monitoring

- Analysis Services (SSAS) Performance and Monitoring Tips

- Event ID 4 - SQL Server Analysis Services: "An error occurred while starting the flight recorder"

There are many other articles about SSAS solutions as Tabular Models, PowerPivot, Data Mining and Analysis Services.

See you soon here !

Brazilian Wiki Ninja Durval 

Today interview is with dev hedgehog - several times WPF category TechNet Guru Contributions winner.

I initiated a contact with Dev hedhehog and I was up to an interesting surprise. Turned out that this account was a shared account by a group of people. Some of them are WPF experts and some prefer to ask questions in forums. 

So, below you'll find answers by one of the group who is WPF guru. I hope you like these answers and don't hesitate to ask more questions:

Who are you, where are you, and what do you do? What are your specialty technologies?

I am dev hedghog. Actually few people use this account to ask or answer questions usually in C# forum and Wpf forum. I am currently in Germany. I am interested in C#, WPF, ASP, SQL...

What is it about TechNet Wiki that interests you?

It's a mix of articles about hacks, tweaks, new technologies and new tools that makes me check Wiki on regual base. I love to read techy articles. Wiki is like a super cool library full of helpful things, tips, tricks, chats and other amazing stuff. So far I placed only few articles. All of them were based on WPF technology. I know I started answering question recently so I am still a "newbie" to this community but I plan however on writing more.

What are your favorite Wiki articles you’ve contributed?

I like uniqueness. So I thought my first article should be something pretty cool and something not many people tried out. So I picked speeding up TreeView. That is my favourite article so far. Many people hate TreeView because with virtualization enabled it doesn't scroll smooth anymore. I have to say Microsoft is not impressing much with the implementation of their WPF Controls. The TreeView, GridView, DataGrid could have been done better. That is not just my opinion. Many people share it. I wish I could chat to a original Microsoft Wpf controls developer. :)

Who has impressed you in the Wiki community, and why?

Pretty much everybody, who likes spending time explaining things to original posters and posting techy articles, impresses me. No matter if in wiki articles or forums questions, it is not so easy to understand what is being asked. Especially when no additional code  was posted. In such case answerers have to recreate the issue by themselves. That takes a lot of time. Finding hacks and posting aricles about them also takes alot of time. Therefore in my opinion those guys are amazing. I usually have time on weekends to take a look at new questions and try to answer them. I hope one day I could be moderator in wpf forum so I can improve questions.

What are your big projects right now?

When I have time I like to work on a 3D wpf control that shall give a completely new experience of data to user. The idea is to dive into complex data structure. The user shall feel relations between data. No more boring flat lists to scroll through or simple tree view. When I am done I think I ll upload the project here or on codeplex. (If wpf hasn't died till then, joke)

What do you do with TechNet Wiki, and how does that fit into the rest of your job?

My job is currently about WPF, C# and consulting clients. Actually I like checking out things that do not really involve my work. Currently I am seeking for articles and tools which allow me to measure performance of .NET apps.

Hope you liked the interview and see you soon with more interviews.

Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.

First up, the weekly leader board snapshot...

Ninja Durval stepping up to take the reigns this week, to lead this leader board into battle of awesome verses mediocre.

With some of our regular steadfasts dropping off the radar this week, it means we have a new batch of names coming to the fore.

Welcome all, to the fame and fortune that life now bestows upon you!

As always, here are the results of another weekly crawl over the updated articles feed.

Most Revisions Award   Who has made the most individual revisions

#1 Durval Ramos with 283 revisions.

#2 Muhammad Ehsan with 108 revisions.

#3 Bob Blork with 74 revisions.

Just behind the winners but also worth a mention are:
 

#4 Saad Mahmood with 60 revisions.

#5 Shanky_621 with 34 revisions.

#6 Anthony Caragol with 32 revisions.

#7 Payman Biukaghazadeh with 22 revisions.

#8 Markus Vilcinskas with 21 revisions.

#9 Ravindar Thati with 14 revisions.

#10 Luciano Lima [MVP] Brazil with 13 revisions.

Most Articles Updated Award   Who has updated the most articles

#1 Durval Ramos with 226 articles.

#2 Bob Blork with 51 articles.

#3 Saad Mahmood with 33 articles.

Just behind the winners but also worth a mention are:
 

#4 Muhammad Ehsan with 27 articles.

#5 Anthony Caragol with 21 articles.

#6 Luciano Lima [MVP] Brazil with 11 articles.

#7 Shanky_621 with 9 articles.

#8 Denis Dyagilev with 8 articles.

#9 Tomasso Groenendijk with 7 articles.

#10 Jaliya Udagedara with 7 articles.

Most Updated Article Award   Largest amount of updated content in a single article

The article to have the most change this week was TechNet Wiki Community Council: Areas of Focus, by Ed Price - MSFT

This week's reviser was Durval Ramos

Congratulations to Ed, for it is the author that wins this award. This article is a great insight into some of the inner workings of TechNet Wiki.

Have a flick through and if you're a regular, you'll recognise many names.

These are the bastions of TechNet Wiki, the unsung (and sometimes glorified ;) heroes, that tinker and toil behind the scenes to make the Wiki so wonderful.

Longest Article Award   Biggest article updated this week

This week's largest document to get some attention is The Windows Azure Pack Wiki (#WAPack), by Hans Vredevoort - Hyper-V MVP

This week's reviser was Hans Vredevoort - Hyper-V MVP

Now, THIS, is soooo awesome. So much pulled together into one place, I have not only bookmarked this, but given it pride of place on my bookmark bar.

I've just had to tear myself away to write this blog. Excellent work Hans, a well deserved MVP!

Most Revised Article Award   Article with the most revisions in a week

This week's most fiddled with article is Why BizTalk? - An Overview and Top New Features, by Muhammad Ehsan. It was revised 23 times last week.

This week's revisers were Muhammad Ehsan & Shanky_621

Good question! Great answer! :D

Ehsan has copied this great article in from his own blog here, and it is gratefully received.

This is a 'must read' for anyone asking this question for their company.

Most Popular Article Award   Collaboration is the name of the game!

The article to be updated by the most people this week is TechNet Guru Contributions for May 2014, by XAML guy

Horaah for the TechNet WIki Gurus stepping up for another bumper month of technical wizardry and IT insight.

Come feast your eyes on the articles headlining this month. Bask in their glory, for Microsoft is saved. A new generation of inspirational heroes emerge from the community!

This week's revisers were Saad Mahmood, Bob Blork, Uwe Ricken, Shanky_621, Rogge, Jaliya Udagedara, Scott M Eastin & Ravindar Thati

As Guru always wins, I highlight the second article to be updated by the most people this week, BizTalk - HL7, by Michael Stephenson UK

This week's revisers were Muhammad Ehsan, Tomasso Groenendijk, Ravindar Thati & Michael Stephenson UK

To those uninitiated, no it's not the latest Half Life game, it's a message protocol. Click in to read more!

Ninja Edit Award   A ninja needs lightning fast reactions!

Below is a list of this week's fastest ninja edits. That's an edit to an article after another person

• Revision 45 of TechNet Guru Contributions for May 2014 was saved by Saad Mahmood just 2 minutes after Bob Blork
• Revision 2 of Some magical operations in Expressions Blend (Windows & Windows Phone) was saved by Bob Blork just 2 minutes after Saad Mahmood

  Yey for Saad and Bob! Both online, both tweaking the wiki!
  Also worth a  mention are:

• Revision 19 of Persian Council Portal was saved by Payman Biukaghazadeh just 4 minutes after Bahareh Moradi
• Revision 3 of Some magical operations in Expressions Blend (Windows & Windows Phone) was saved by Saad Mahmood just 4 minutes after Bob Blork
• Revision 44 of TechNet Guru Contributions for May 2014 was saved by Bob Blork just 12 minutes after Saad Mahmood
• Revision 1 of How To Avoid Syncing Accidental Deletes To The Cloud Directory was saved by Bob Blork just 17 minutes after Aanchal Saxena
• Revision 34 of AADSync Installation Guide was saved by Markus Vilcinskas just 20 minutes after Andreas Kjellman
• Revision 47 of TechNet Guru Contributions for May 2014 was saved by Saad Mahmood just 23 minutes after Bob Blork
• Revision 18 of Persian Council Portal was saved by Bahareh Moradi just 29 minutes after Payman Biukaghazadeh
• Revision 1 of 2013 منابع ماکروسافت داینامیک سی آر ام was saved by Payman Biukaghazadeh just 41 minutes after mahnaz zahabi

What a very busy week!

Some great articles for you to peruse, some new names to learn, lots of love around the wiki, and the sun is shining on another batch of Gurus.

Wiki life is good! 

Best regards,
Pete Laker

How much time do you spend on setting good tags on an article, when you're putting together a new Wiki article, or when you are reviewing existing TNWiki articles?
Seconds, minutes?

Have you ever had some bizarre suggestions when you tried to add your tags to your article?
In this blog post I'll provide some insights in the world of TechNet Wiki tagging.
And I'll provide some practical hints and tips to get it done correctly...

How do tags work?

Check the description on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata).

"In information systems, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an Internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system."

Usually a tag is used to assign categories to the article, to group it, to ease search and to ease management of articles...
But how does that reflect to TechNet Wiki?

Facts and figures

Let me kick off with some numbers.
(Note: Please realize numbers can vary on a daily basis, so you get a snapshot of the statistics today, but the overall picture stays the same over time.)

How many articles do we have at TechNet Wiki?
16.000 + (Hint: see the TNWiki featured articles page.)

How many tags do we have at TNWiki?
18741 (and growing)

Yes, 18K+ tags!

For your information the TechNet Wiki sitemap has the list of ALL tags.

WARNING: It's an awful large document that takes quite some time to load. (I've warned you!)

So there is something wrong here, we have more tags than articles...
Using some powershell scripting and the Technet Wiki sitemap I've been analyzing the numbers.

Deep dive on TechNet Wiki tags

By default the TechNet Wiki is providing you with the most popular tags used, the TNWIKI Tag Cloud. (http://aka.ms/TNWikiTagCloud)

The tag cloud contains the TOP 100 of most used tags:

What's behind the TNWiki tag cloud?

Top 3 popular tags:

1. EN-US: 9840+ articles
2. Has Image: 4500+
3. Has TOC: 3400+ count

This top 100 does not count the hidden/deleted articles.

Just for your information, we have almost 5000 hidden/deleted articles, mostly spam, duplicates, violations of TOU (terms of use), and archived articles.

But there is more interesting stuff...

Top 10 Tag frequency graph

If you check out how frequent a tag is used, you'll get some astonishing numbers.

In short, we have 12295 tags, only used 1 time.
2292 tags have been used twice.

Tag's length

If you check the statistics on tag length, it's getting bizarre.

 The longest tag is 173 characters.
The shortest tag... is 1 char.

We got more than half of the articles with tags longer than 14 characters.
Here you see how the tag length is spread:

Number of words per tag

Tag Count	#Words in tag
5892	1
5573	2
3317	3
1383	4
755	5
419	6
258	7
168	8
112	9
68	10
64	11
50	12
25	13
23	14
10	15
15	16
12	17
10	18
2	19
1	20
5	21
4	22
3	23
1	24
1	25

If you want to analyse it yourself: I've shared the analysis data here (but can't guarantee a life-time availability).

TNWiki tags collection.xlsx

See also

If you need more help on using tags, check these resources:

• TechNet Wiki Tags
• Wiki: Common Tags
• TechNet Wiki: Technology Tags
• Wiki: How to Filter Tag Results by More than One Tag
• TechNet Wiki: Getting Started

Lessons learned

Back to the basics:

• keep it simple.
• The more you use a tag, the better they get.

Take aways: How to set tags properly

• The power of the tag is in being NON-UNIQUE
  • Re-use tags as much as possible
  • A tag used one time is useless; it will not be found.
  • A unique tag has no efficiency.
• Keep the tags short
  • Think of an article tag as a #hashtag
  • The less characters used, the better

• Keep the tag word count down
  • By preference 1 word or 2 word tags
  • Only use more words if REALLY necessary
• Check if there are similar tags in use already
• Better multiple re-usable good keywords that one long one-time tag

Hints:

• if you want to avoid the wrong tags being suggested in the Wiki editor: type your tag, and terminate with a comma.

I sincerely hope this helps you to be a better TechNet Wiki article writer, and to get more out of TNWiki.
Because using the tags properly is a responsibility we all need to take care of!

Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.

First up, the weekly leader board snapshot...

Fernando still racing ahead of the pack, with master wikier Ed biting his heels!

And hey, who's this just behind Benoit? Me? Yey! I've been commenting on a lot of articles last week, linking back to Top Contributors mentions of the past, so it pays to comment!

As always, here are the results of another weekly crawl over the updated articles feed.

Most Revisions Award   Who has made the most individual revisions

#1 Fernando Lugão Veltem with 365 revisions.

#2 Ed Price - MSFT with 273 revisions.

#3 Benoit Jester - MTFC with 145 revisions.

Just behind the winners but also worth a mention are:

#4 Carsten Siemens with 119 revisions.

#5 Shanky_621 with 56 revisions.

#6 i.biswajith with 40 revisions.

#7 Durval Ramos with 27 revisions.

#8 Peter Geelen - MSFT with 27 revisions.

#9 Shreeharsh Ambli with 25 revisions.

#10 TrinadhK with 18 revisions.

Most Articles Updated Award   Who has updated the most articles

#1 Fernando Lugão Veltem with 301 articles.

#2 Ed Price - MSFT with 183 articles.

#3 Carsten Siemens with 97 articles.

Just behind the winners but also worth a mention are:

#4 Benoit Jester - MTFC with 80 articles.

#5 i.biswajith with 21 articles.

#6 Shanky_621 with 21 articles.

#7 Shreeharsh Ambli with 10 articles.

#8 Jefferson Castilho with 9 articles.

#9 Luciano Lima [MVP] Brazil with 7 articles.

#10 Durval Ramos with 6 articles.

Most Updated Article Award   Largest amount of updated content in a single article

The article to have the most change this week was Office 365 : Disponiblité du "Office 365 Plan Selector Tool" (fr-FR), by Benoit Jester - MTFC

This week's reviser was Benoit Jester - MTFC,

Not that large, but all new and shiny from Benoit. Still got that scratch protector layer of film on it and that new car smell!!

Longest Article Award   Biggest article updated this week

This week's largest document to get some attention [other than those recently mentioned in past awards] is Virtual Machine Manager Error Codes (2500-2999), by Ed Price - MSFT

This week's reviser was Carsten Siemens,

Another cracker from Ed, you'll have to agree...

As you can imagine there are quite a lot of numbers between 2500 and 2999 and what a roller coaster of emotions this read will take you on.

I laughed, I cried. I went on a journey and learnt something about myself. The third column in particular often left me feeling quite blank :/

Most Revised Article Award   Article with the most revisions in a week

This week's most fiddled with article is TechNet Guru Contributions for April 2014, by XAML guy. It was revised 24 times last week.

This week's revisers were XAML guy, Dave Jaskie, Michael Amadi, Magnus (MM8), Durval Ramos, Matthew Yarlett, pituach, Steef-Jan Wiggers, Praveen Rayan D'sa, Tomasso Groenendijk, Mr X, Muhammad Ehsan, pumpkinszwan, Shanky_621, SubramanyamRaju.B, Ed Price - MSFT, Naomi N & Denis Cooper

An explosion of awesomeness from so many great names of the community, and a few new names rising through the ranks to get their names known. April is now with the judges (MVPs and employees from Microsoft) and we hope to have a result by mid month.

This week's second most fiddled with article is Testing WCF Service endpoints hosted in BizTalk with SOAPUI, by Steef-Jan Wiggers. It was revised 18 times last week.

This week's revisers were Steef-Jan Wiggers, Shanky_621 & Carsten Siemens

As the Guru competition always dominates this award, I mention number 2 from Wiki legend and regular Ninja blogger, Steef-Jan.

This article is just teh ticket for anyone interested in propelling their BizTalk skills into orbit. Steef-Jan has been busy buffing this new arrival to perfection.

Most Popular Article Award   Collaboration is the name of the game!

The article to be updated by the most people this week is TechNet Guru Contributions for April 2014, by XAML guy

As above, April was another sensational competition with another awesome bunch of entries. Let's hope May is even better!

This week's revisers were XAML guy, Dave Jaskie, Michael Amadi, Magnus (MM8), Durval Ramos, Matthew Yarlett, pituach, Steef-Jan Wiggers, Praveen Rayan D'sa, Tomasso Groenendijk, Mr X, Muhammad Ehsan, pumpkinszwan, Shanky_621, SubramanyamRaju.B, Ed Price - MSFT, Naomi N & Denis Cooper

The article to be updated by the most people this week is Turkish Avengers Team Council Center, by Gokan Ozcifci

Gokan's band of merry men continue their rise to glory and immortal fame. The TAT are a loose collection of some of the very best Turkey has to offer.

Still not sure what they are avenging, probably Apple or Google, but I'm with them every step of the way!

This week's revisers were Mehmet PARLAKYIGIT-TAT, Ugur Demir - TAT, Chen V, Davut EREN - TAT, Ersin CAN - TAT & Yavuz Tasci -TAT

Ninja Edit Award   A ninja needs lightning fast reactions!

Below is a list of this week's fastest ninja edits. That's an edit to an article after another person

• Version 7 of Demystify Lync 2013 Server internal certificate requirements was saved by Fernando Lugão Veltem just 1 minute after Peter Geelen - MSFT

  Congratulations Fernando, your hand is fast but steady ;)
  Also top tenners this week are:

• Version 11 of Testing WCF Service endpoints hosted in BizTalk with SOAPUI was saved by Shanky_621 just 2 minutes after Steef-Jan Wiggers
• Version 1 of Using System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) for Applocker alerting and reporting was saved by Fernando Lugão Veltem just 2 minutes after Dave Jaskie
• Version 616 of Turkish Avengers Team Council Center was saved by Chen V just 3 minutes after Davut EREN - TAT
• Version 1 of Importing an Excel Spreadsheet into a SQL Server Database was saved by Fernando Lugão Veltem just 5 minutes after Durval Ramos
• Version 4 of Creating friendly week names in Power Pivot and SSAS Tabular models with DAX was saved by Fernando Lugão Veltem just 5 minutes after Michael Amadi
• Version 12 of Testing WCF Service endpoints hosted in BizTalk with SOAPUI was saved by Steef-Jan Wiggers just 7 minutes after Shanky_621
• Version 12 of AAD Cloud App Discovery Preview - Frequently Asked Questions was saved by Markus Vilcinskas just 7 minutes after Nima Hashemi
• Version 3 of WindowsPhone Store 8.1 vs WindowsPhone 8: Launchers and Choosers(C#-XAML) was saved by Shreeharsh Ambli just 8 minutes after SubramanyamRaju.B
• Version 2 of Active Directory Back to Basics–Password Policies was saved by Denis Cooper just 10 minutes after Mahdi Tehrani

Wow what a cracker of a week. I've been reading till my head hurts and it still keeps coming!

Thanks folks! Hugs and high fives all round!

Best regards,
Pete Laker