Philo's WebLogMusings of a former Office Developer EvangelistA simple conceit vs. questions left unasked- October 27, 2007 Here's a fun mental exercise - on the one hand, we have the "everyone is lost but me" syndrome, where someone will charge off on a course of action, despite many many warnings about the perilous nature of his quest, until he runs smack dab into that windmill. And yet we have "there is no such thing as a stupid question" - where even though everyone around you seems to know what's going on, and you see some flaw, the refrain is "it never hurts to ask the question." How do we reconcile these...http://blogs.msdn.com/philoj/archive/2007/10/26/a-simple-conceit-vs-questions-left-unasked... Dimension Security in SQL Server Analysis Services- October 25, 2007 I know, the mind boggles - a developer writing about security... While I was doing the research for this, I was startled by the number of articles on this topic that immediately talk about using MDX queries for dimension security. While MDX queries offer powerful fine-tuning capabilities for restricting access to data in Analysis Services, your first stop should be user roles coupled with Active Directory security groups and Dimension Data filters. Very straightforward and an easy starting...http://blogs.msdn.com/philoj/archive/2007/10/25/dimension-security-in-sql-server-analysis-... This year's hammer - voice prompts- October 24, 2007 "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" I use this quote a lot to warn against the tendency we have to overimplement new technologies and solutions. Even as I go through InfoPath and BI solutions, I will warn that while InfoPath is a forms solution, it's not the solution to every forms problem (though hopefully it'll address a lot of them!) So I wish the speech recognition frenzy would dial it down a bit. Speech recognition for voice prompts is pretty cool, and may have...http://blogs.msdn.com/philoj/archive/2007/10/23/this-year-s-hammer-voice-prompts.aspx Scorecards - SharePoint, SQL Server, or PerformancePoint- October 8, 2007 A few years ago, if you asked Microsoft how to build a scorecard, they may have shrugged. Then we released the "Business Scorecard Accelerator" - a free technology mainly designed to showcase SQL Server Analysis Services. It was so popular that Microsoft made a product out of it - Business Scorecard Manager 2005. While BSM could pull data from ODBC data sources, its best buddy was still Analysis Services. With the right cube, you could throw together a scorecard in under a day. Of course, BSM..http://blogs.msdn.com/philoj/archive/2007/10/08/scorecards-sharepoint-sql-server-or-perfor... |