Data Mining in the Cloud

I’ve mentioned Microsoft’s Data Mining site in a previous post – it’s well worth a look if you are interested in the Data Mining capabilities of SQL Server 2005 or 2008.  There’s good coverage of the excellent Excel Data Mining add-in for SQL Server 2005 and 2008 plus links to lots of good training material and Webcasts.  

In the past week they have also released a Data Mining in the Clouds sample.  This lets you try out many of the features that the Excel add-in gives you, but instead of connecting to your own Analysis Services server you connect to a Microsoft Cloud Service.  You can try it out in a browser by visiting this site, or there is an option to download a new Excel 2007 add-in specifically for connecting to the cloud service.

Technorati tags: Data Mining, Excel, SQL Server, Cloud Computing

SharePoint and Paintball

So apparently there is a National Professional Paintball League – and their web site is hosted on SharePoint!  Actually I also noticed that there’s an annual SharePoint MVP Paintball Outing at their Global Summit, maybe they should join the league .

Technorati tags: SharePoint, internet, case Study

2009 For Office vNext?

According to this post from Mary-Jo Foley, Office 14 will be in alpha testing before year-end (Office 2007 was previously known as Office 12, so they’re skipping unlucky Office 13).   Office 2007 has been around for a fair while now with a second service pack already in the works.  Many of my own clients are only just beginning to think about when and how (or even if) they move to 2007 – when budgets get tightened, it becomes very difficult to justify an upgrade of hundreds or thousands of desktop licences. 

For me, the two most compelling reasons for upgrading to Office 2007 are:

1. The tighter integration with SharePoint 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – if you are using or planning to use SharePoint, you will find a whole host of features in Office 2007 that make life easier, such as PowerPoint slide libraries, tighter Outlook integration, workflows, Excel publishing and much more.  For a detailed breakdown of how different versions of Office work with SharePoint, I would recommend downloading the Fair, Good, Better,Best white paper from Microsoft.

2. The Business Intelligence features in Excel 2007.  For a lot of users, this is the only client they will need to connect to and query Analysis Services cubes in SQL Server 2005/8.  And now there’s also the Data Mining Add-in for Excel 2007 which comes with lots of useful wizards for help with pattern and relationship discovery when working with large sets of data (if you regularly analyse large sets of data in Excel, I would definitely take a look at this – even if you don’t have access to an Analysis Services server you can try it out by running SQL Server Developer Edition on your desktop).

Back to Mary-Jo’s post, there’s one quote which shouldn’t be overlooked, particularly if you are planning your SharePoint implementation and thinking about future-proofing your investment – ‘Please note that Office “14” servers are 64-bit only’. Bear this in mind when you are setting up your SharePoint server farm!

Technorati tags: Office 2007, Office 14

Pointy Haired Dilbert – Great Resource for Excel Users

I consider myself to be a reasonably proficient Excel user but I’m constantly amazed by how much I don’t know when I see articles and tips which turn up at Chandoo’s Pointy Haired Dilbert blog.  Lots of good data visualisation stuff as well. 

The most recent post from guest contributor Robert is the first in a series on Creating KPI Dashboards in Microsoft Excel : 

Very inventive, and all done without the use of VBA!

Technorati tags: Excel, dashboard, kpi

SnagIt – I LoveIt

I make a fair amount of screen-capture images, for documentation, training notes and presentations.  Until recently was using any one of Alt-PrtScn, screen clippings in OneNote, and the Vista Snipping Tool, depending on which computer I was using and whether I needed to capture a Window or screen area.

A few months ago I spent $49.95 on SnagIt from TechSmith and was very impressed with what it could do – not only capturing windows, areas and menus but also capable of capturing the entire contents of a scrollable Internet Explorer window.  More recently I upgraded to Snagit 9.0, which also features an excellent version of SnagIt Editor with an auto-store feature, as you can see below (SnagIt also lets you add the special effects by the way):

 

This makes it really simple to capture a set of shots for training notes or manuals as the captures can easily be stored and categorised.  It’s a real time saver if you are involved in software or web site testing and need to illustrate bugs or other problems while you work through the test plan.  Highly recommended.

Technorati tags: snagit, screen capture, screen clipping