John Workman

The Workdog's weblog.... a brain dump, of sorts.

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Monday, August 18, 2008 #

I've finally arrived!!! 

Three years ago as we were building our house I had the whole thing wired with CAT-5.  Everyone said I was crazy since WiFi was working so well.  I responsed with, "yeah, WiFi is great for my laptop, but when I'm streaming my TVs through my computer, I'll be happy it's hardwired". 

For the past year I've been streaming my movies to my XBox 360, and that's been great.  None of that compares to the excitement I've had using TVTonic to download the Olympics and stream them to my XBox.  With two young kids, I've missed a lot more than I wanted to.  I saw part of the opening ceromonies, but I missed all the cool parts that everyone at work was talking about.  During my digging to find videos online, I found TVTonic.  This absolutely ROCKS!!!  I was able to select which events I want to watch (Opening Ceremonies, Swimming, etc.) and it began downloading it all.  Then, as new events take place, it records those too.  It's like having a Tivo that will go back in time.  The picture quality is very good, and I don't have to sit at my computer to watch it, although I could.  It plays through Vista Media Center, which I then hit through the MC Extender. 

If there are any events that you missed and still want to see, check this out.  You won't regret it!

 


It's official!  I'm now registered for the BI Conference 2008 in Seattle from October 6-8, 2008.  I'm very excited about this event.  It looks like there are going to be some good sessions, although I was hoping they would some MDX sessions.  Looks like you have to wait for PASS Community Summit 2008 for those.  The likelihood of me swinging a second trip to Seattle a month later is slim to none. 

If there are any other GWB members that are planning to be there, let me know.  It would be great to meet up.   

 


Tuesday, June 17, 2008 #

I am one of the fortunate ones who had the opportunity to evaluate SlickEdit.  I happened to choose the Visual Studio plug in, as I use exclusively Visual Studio for development.  My first thought was, “Where is it?”  This tool is integrated with Visual Studio so well that you think it is part of the product.  Obviously my second question was “What hasn’t Microsoft bought them and included it in their product?” 

 

I’m not as much of a hard-core coder these days, but I still find myself using Visual Studio on a daily basis.  Some of the things that I found really helpful were the “Show Diff” and the “RegEx Evaluator”.  I am thrilled about the show diff functionality.  VS 2000 had a windiff feature, but for some reason MS left that out of 2005.  I have an old dev box that I terminal service into to do file diffs because it still has VS 2000.  Thanks to SlickEdit I can stop that practice. 

 

I know there are a ton of other features that I am looking forward to exploring.  This product has a nice “SlickEdit Tools Assistant”, which is one of the better help systems I’ve seen in a software produce.  As I dive deeper, I’ll keep you updated with any cool features I find, as well as anything that I think needs improvement.  So far, I like what I’ve seen.

 


Monday, May 05, 2008 #

I received a broadcast email today from Xobni announcing that they have released Xobni for Outlook to the masses.  You can download it here:  http://www.xobni.com/download

and read about it here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/technology/05xobni.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

To give you a little understanding of the people behind Xobni, I want to fill you in on my experience.  I've had a beta copy of Xobni installed on each of my three PCs.  My home PC is runs Vista Ultimate and Office 2007.  This PC runs with two profiles (myself and my wife).  I ran into some issues with Xobni if you shut down outlook, you couldn't re-open it unless you go to task mgr and kill it.  For this reason, I un-installed it from my home pc.  During the uninstall it asked for a free form text of why you were un-installing it.  Being a good beta user, I filled it out.  A few days later I received an email from Matt Brezina, co-founder of Xobni.  He asked they could set up a call and talk through the problems I was experiencing.  I was so impressed with their drive for quality, that I agreed.  I ended up having an hour long call with Greg Thatcher from Xobni, during which I let him remote control my PC, review log files and do some testing to make sure he fully understood my issue.   During this time he started digging for more information around performance and other user experience areas.  I have never seen a beta program that was this dedicated to getting it right.  I can't begin to express the amount of respect I have for these guys.  What an awesome organization!


Thursday, March 13, 2008 #

One of the things that I think is unusual about Xobni is that they have a place for photos in the corner.  Who is going to take the time to configure all of these.  In my opinion, no one.  So here's my idea... Link this to Email2Face.  I don't think there is a hugh number of people in their database yet.  If products like this begin to link to it, it will help it to grow and both groups will benefit. 

I'm really enjoying Xobni.  If you haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend it.  I have a few additional invites I'm willing to share.  First come first serve.  Leave a comment if you are interested. 

 


Monday, March 10, 2008 #

After using Xobni for a full day at work, I am very excited.  I've turned several friends onto it and they love it too.  I was disappointed for the first few hours as I thought it wouldn't update all of my history, but slowly it seemed to do that.  It is truly an impressive application.

Few things missing...  it needs to better display the contact info.  It will show me cell phone numbers for folks in my contact list, but I have to right click and view their contact info to see the other numbers.  I expected all of them to show up automagically.  If the data is in my contact list, it should pull it. 

With Outlook 2007, I have my to-do bar on the left.  Now my Xobni bar is there too.  It would be nice if I could dock each toolbar like you do in visual studios.  I would like to have Xobni at the top and my to-do bar underneath, not side by side. 

Thanks guys, I'm digging it!


I won Stupid prize number 15 in the Community Credit February contest.  I never thought I would be so excited to be in 15th place, but I was.  I am getting a copy of Microserfs.  15th place would be more disappointing if there weren't so many rock stars out there raking in the points. 15th place is awesome! :)


Sunday, March 09, 2008 #

I've finally downloaded Xobni for my Inbox.  (see link on my blog).    I've been hesitant to put it on my work laptop, until I heard that Microsoft is backing this.  So far it looks awesome.  I'll give it a few days and write a review.

Friday, February 29, 2008 #

I copied a bunch of movies on to my blackberry using Media Studio for Blackberry.  I have a 2 gb card in it, so I can fit 4 movies at high quality.  I had this great idea.  I found a female to USB Female A To USB Mini Male B 5 Pin Adapter on Amazon for $6, and I thought I would be able to store additional movies on my thumb drive and copy them to and from my blackberry without having to connect it to my laptop.  Sound perfect, doesn't it.  Unfornately the USB Drive isn't "plug and play" on my blackberry.  I stil think this can be done, I just haven't figured it out yet.   I think one of the problems is that the blackberry doesn't put out power like a laptop/pc does. I also thought this would be great if someone had a file on their USB Drive to give me I could just plug it into my BB and copy it over.  No need to go back to my desk.  Oh well, nice try, huh.

If anyone has figured this out, please enlighten me.

USB Female A To USB Mini Male B 5 Pin Adapter Free Shipping


One of the things that used to drive me crazy with PerformancePoint was that I could only fit two drop down parameters on the top of a dashboard.  I finally found this post that explains how to adjust it.  It works great.  Then tonight, I was trying to do it again and I had to search forever for it, so here it is.  Preserved forever.

If you need to change the width of the parameter drop downs in PerformancePoint Server 2007, check out this link.

http://blogs.msdn.com/performancepoint/archive/2007/12/18/working-with-the-monitoring-css-files-to-adjust-settings-in-deployed-dashboards.aspx


Thursday, February 28, 2008 #

Aseem Nayar posted a Documentation Map for Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 at the following link: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/performancepoint/HA102422371033.aspx

It's great to see that the documentation is starting to flow. 

Here's a link to some training videos too.  http://www.microsoft.com/business/performancepoint/resources/training.aspx

 


As I wrote about yesterday, I am in the process of building out virtual images with PerformancePoint. I figured out how to rename the server and have both SharePoint Services and PerformancePoint work (see yesterday's post.) 

Today, while working with the server, I realized that none of my Proclarity views were working.  I tried several things and finally I gave up, uninstalled the Proclarity Analytics Server and re-installed it.  This worked great in getting it up and running.  Only took about 10 minutes.  Once that was taken care of, the Proclarity reports still didn't work.  I thought I had a great idea and I set everything up as http://localhost instead of the server name.  So I went through every report on my server and pointed them from the older server to localhost.  This was a slow process, but once it was done everything worked great.... FROM my machine.  As soon as I ran the dashboard from another box, it failed.  The moral of the story is, DO NOT use localhost as the server name in Proclarity reports.  I thought I was saving myself some effort if I clone the VS. I then had to go back and reset them all to the new server name.  This is a pain because I did it all by hand.  Soon I will document the steps to save this off as a BSWX file and modify the xml to change the urls.  This is a much more efficient way to go, especially if you have to do it twice. 

Once this was done, everything worked great.  If I find a better way to handle Proclarity, I'll re-post.  In the meantime, this works, so give it a try.

 


Wednesday, February 27, 2008 #

 I'm in an running Virtual images for development and demos that are stand along PerformancePoint Servers.  They are running Windows Server 2003, SQLServer 2005, SharePoint Services 3.0, and PerformancePoint Server.  I have a development environment and a DMZ environment that can each run 5 instances of the Virtual image.  To make this setup easier, we created a "gold" image that we will use as our baseline image for each of the environments. 

 

If you try to do this, what you will quickly find out is that all hell breaks loose when you go to rename the server.  SharePoint hates it.  PerformancePoint hates it.  It's just a bad seen.  fortunately, I'm managed to figure this out.  And fortunately, I managed to document (most of it).  I have to repeat this process several more times, so I will update this post when I find things that I failed to document.

 

How to rename a server running SharePoint Services 3.0. 

Prior to renaming the server, you need to run a command line exe called stsadm.exe. 

  • To do this, go to start=>run=>cmd
  • Navigate to c:\program files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN
  • Type the following command
    • Stsadm.exe -o renameserver -oldservername <oldServerName> -newservername <newServerName>

Now you can go to My Computer => Properties and rename the server. 

Obviously you need to reboot after this.

 

Now that you are up and running, open a browser and go to your SharePoint site.

Change administrator name

Click the down arrow next to Welcome ….  My Settings

Modify the account name (currently has local box\name)

 

 

How to rename a server running PerformancePoint

There are multiple places that you need to change to update the server name.  If you are in a position like I am with the demo boxes where everything runs local, I am setting everything to "localhost" instead of the server name.  This only works well an environment like mine where these are dev boxes and everything runs stand alone on the same box.  Otherwise you want to update it with the new server name.  Here's a list of the places I wrote down.  I'll update this if I find any that I'm missing.

 

  • Navigate to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories\80
  • Open web.config 
  • Find and replace the old server name with the new (or localhost in my case)

 

  • Navigate to c:\program files\microsoft office performancepoint server\3.0\monitoring\ppsmonitoring_1\webservice
  • Open web.config 
  • Find and replace the old server name with the new (or localhost in my case)

 

  • Navigate to c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server\3.0\Monitoring\Preview
  • Open web.config 
  • Find and replace the old server name with the new (or localhost in my case)

 

  • Navigate to c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server\3.0\Tools\MonitoringConfiguration
  • Open monitoringConfig.xml
  • Find and replace the old server name with the new (or localhost in my case)

 

Like I said, with this many changes, it likely that I forgot to writedown one, but hopefully this gets you started.

 

The next step is to go through and update all of our datasources in PerformancePoint to point to the new server name (or localhost if appropriate)


Wednesday, February 20, 2008 #

Here's part two of Stephen Swoyer's article on PerformancePoint Server.  Great quotes! :)

http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=8804

http://www.esj.com/business_intelligence/article.aspx?EditorialsID=8804