If you haven't heard, Microsoft has made changes to the PerformancePoint product alignment . Basically this means PPS no longer exists as a separate product - the dashboard and analytic (M/A) components are being folded into MOSS, while Planning is being...

Well, it took the better part of a year, but my second book, Pro PerformancePoint Server 2007: Building Business Intelligence Solutions (Pro) (APress) should be rolling off the presses as you read this. It's almost 500 pages, and I tried to cover Microsoft...

For folks who want to play with our Business Intelligence technologies and don't want to bother with installing everything, you can download a virtual machine image that has just about everything installed you could want, including demo content. The...

Okay, this was a rough one. The challenge was that a customer had Excel spreadsheets where we needed to transpose the rows and columns. In other words, the spreadsheet looked like this: But we needed the records to list Program values by date, like...

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...

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...

"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...

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...

As follow-up to the "hook InfoPath to a database" demo, here I'm taking a step back to a simpler form - building an InfoPath form to be used on its own in conjunction with SharePoint. http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=344635 In the next...

Analysis Services has been part of SQL Server for a while, but it's underappreciated by most. I've posted another video on Channel 9 to try to share what a powerful capability this is for understanding large volumes of aggregated data. More than just...

I wrote this post on Joel On Software in 2004 in response to a newbie asking about EDI. Since then I have referred several people to it, but a few times I've found the post tricky to find. So, instead of constantly relying on the benevolence of Joel acting...

Okay, I'm going to try a different approach on the "why do I care about InfoPath?" issue. I recorded a short screencast and posted it to Channel9: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=343092 In the screencast, I walk through setting up...

I give a lot of product briefings, and of course often get caught between what I know and what I can say. In these cases I often find it useful to use Urquhart's Avoidance, made famous in the BBC miniseries " House of Cards " (which I highly recommend...

Simon said: "Then you find out its not part of the office suite." To be fair, this is somewhat true. At best, it's confusing. With Office 2003, InfoPath wasn't part of the suite you could buy retail or on open license. However, if you bought...

I recently wrote a book on InfoPath 2007 . What I find most amazing about the book is that it's evangelizing InfoPath. I've shown a number of developers the book, and when they read the description, their reaction is "wow, InfoPath sounds cool - I should...

You know, I never cease to be amazed at how smart people get stuck in ruts (myself included). I was a WordStar user in the '80's. Correction - power user. I knew all the dot commands, advanced commands, could make WordStar sing like the devil's own...

It took me a while to figure out how to do the InfoPath/webservice thing starting with an InfoPath form. Maybe this is blindingly obvious to everyone but me, but here it is anyway: 1) Create an InfoPath form from a new, blank form: 2) Lay...

Argh. Classic Schroedinbug . I had an outer join between two tables to populate an InfoPath multi-select listbox . (So I needed a list of potential options with indications of which options had been selected). I created an outer join and put my parameter...

This MSDN article shows how to implement a SharePoint web part that can act as a consumer or a provider. However, if you try to use it as a "drill through" web part (another web part filters the results in this web part; clicking on this web part filters...

Enable an InfoPath form to post another form via email....

The challenge: use InfoPath to create an editor for the Structured Product Labeling (SPL) subset of the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) schema. I've done quite a bit of document-centric work, and my philosophy has always been to design an...

Over the next few days I'll be posting a series of articles covering my trials and tribulations in creating an “HL7 Generator” - specifically using InfoPath to generate XML in the Structured Product Label format, which is a subset of the Clinical...

InfoPath SP1 ( public beta at the link; final due out this summer) includes a lot of cool changes, both in the UI and behind the scenes (most notably the ability to stuff managed code behind the form). First I'm going to cover the OnContextChange event...

Lots of samples flying around - I think we released new versions of just about everything we publish in the last twelve months, so everyone is publishing all kinds of tutorials and how-tos online. In observation of this, I have one simple request ...

1. Grab the nearest book. 2. Open the book to page 23. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. “Right-click the My Documents folder and select Properties” (from Hillier...