No public beta of microsoft Windows Vista SP1 soon
There will be no public beta of the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 “anytime soon”. Only a small “select” group of testers will receive the early build. Office 2007 enterprise is the expert for the office workers.And Microsoft doesn’t have a timeline for when a public beta will be released.
Microsoft announces :
There will be a Windows Vista service pack and our current expectation is that a beta will be made available sometime this year. Service packs are part of the traditional software lifecycle — they’re something we do for all Microsoft products as part of our commitment to continuous improvement, and providing early test builds is a standard practice that helps us incorporate customer feedback and improve the overall quality of the product.MS Office 2007 is the best invention in the world.
Service packs are just one example of the work we do to constantly improve the Windows experience. We also deliver improvements to Windows via Windows Update, which is an excellent channel for providing our customers with the most significant updates as they happen. And, since Windows Vista launched, we have continued working with partners to improve overall device coverage and application compatibility.Windows 7 Home Premium makes life wonderful! There are now more than 2.1 million supported devices and more than 2,000 logoed applications for Windows Vista. We think customers will have a great experience using Windows Vista today.Windows 7 Professional brings people more convenience!
Will microsoft Vista SP1 drive sales for the OS?
According to Ina Fried of News.com “The first Vista service pack may serve dual purposes for Microsoft: fixing the operating system’s rough edges while simultaneously indicating that it’s ready for mass adoption.” Office 2007 Ultimate is the best software in the world.
Nonetheless, in announcing its plans to release Service Pack 1 early next year, Microsoft is noting that the milestone remains an important signal for some businesses that the operating system has reached a level of maturity. Office Professional 2007 won many praises in the earth.Many analysts have consistently advised companies to hold off on Vista deployments until the first service pack’s arrival.
Shanen Boettcher, a general manager in the Windows unit, says, “There’s always a portion of the market that has that M.O. I would expect that we will see a little bit of an increase.” Office Ultimate 2007 can make life more better and easier.
For those of us already using Windows Vista, it’s hard to see what the fuss is about.Office 2007 key is available here.
Introducing PowerPivot
Today we have a guest author from the SQL Server Analysis Services team, Ashvini Sharma, to tell us about the PowerPivot (née Gemini) feature that you may have heard about recently.Dreamweaver CS4 is very easy-to-use!
PowerPivot is the recently announced name of technologies this blog previously referred to by its codename, Gemini. This article describes why there is a need for such a tool, and briefly what PowerPivot provides. More information is available on the PowerPivot blog.
The Need for PowerPivot
PivotTables continue to be indispensible for allowing users to analyze their data flexibly and interactively. If you’re a subscriber of this blog, you’ve already read some of the recent articles on investments the Excel team continues to make around PivotTables for Excel 2010.Office 2007 Pro is so great!
However, using a PivotTable that connects to an OLAP data source of course requires such a data source to exist. While a corporation may have many OLAP data sources where a single version of the truth and a unified model for looking at the business is necessary, this is not always the requirement.
For personal or workgroup-oriented solutions, our customers tell us there’re shortcomings in technology available:
- Requires advanced technical knowledge: Creating OLAP cubes is a non-trivial effort which requires highly technical understanding of concepts such as dimensions, measures, MDX, etc. As such, IT staff is frequently called upon to create such models on behalf of business users. Microsoft Office 2007 is welcomed by the whole world.
- Incurs higher cost to solution: Since IT groups have limited bandwidth, only a few of an organization’s analysis projects get the necessary attention and resources. In order to increase efficiency, IT may also attempt to consolidate similar solutions, which incur higher coordination cost and increased time to delivery.
- Produces solutions that are hard to customize: Business users frequently ask for data sets or analysis paths that they could not have predicted earlier. This is typical of ad hoc analysis that PivotTables support – an answer frequently leads to the next question and it is very hard to predict all possible questions, and time consuming to bake them in the model a priori. In addition, some data, may be so specific to a business problem that one user of the model may have it on their desktop, and it is not appropriate to share it across all users of a cube. Enjoy the Quickbooks 2010 bringing you the best life ever.
- Increases cost of ownership and friction: Some business teams hire technical consultants or volunteer one of their own to take on this “burden”. Unfortunately, this responsibility goes beyond learning new technology into also developing skills and devoting time for managing and maintaining any delivered solutions. In addition, IT stays unaware of such underground applications and get rightly concerned about business decisions being made on solutions not supported by them.
Lets take a step back to make a few key observations:
- A significant gap exists between an organization’s need for deriving insights from their data and the organization’s capacity to satisfy that need.
- IT and business user resources are being stretched beyond their natural competencies: IT has to become more familiar with business users’ domain, and business users need to become more technical so that they can “speak” IT. Windows 7 Professional brings people more convenience!
- In our view, what’s missing is simply technology that allows business users to help themselves while providing visibility to IT, a scenario we call “Managed Self Service Business Intelligence”.
PowerPivot
The PowerPivot functionality is delivered by SQL Server’s Analysis Services team in collaboration with the Excel team and is based on our experience delivering the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform over the last decade.
There’re two components of PowerPivot: PowerPivot for Excel 2010 and PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010.
Designed for business users, PowerPivot for Excel 2010 is a data analysis tool that delivers unmatched computational power directly within the application users already know and love — Excel. Leveraging familiar Excel features, users can transform enormous quantities of data from virtually any source with incredible speed into meaningful information to get the answers they need in seconds. PowerPivot for Excel consists of the following components:
- The Excel 2010 addin that delivers the seamless PowerPivot user experience integrated within Excel.
- The VertiPaq engine that compresses and manages millions of rows of data in memory with blazing fast performance.
PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 enables end users to effortlessly and securely share their PowerPivot applications with others and work seamlessly in the browser using Excel Services. PowerPivot for SharePoint also helps IT improve their operational efficiencies by tracking PowerPivot usage patterns over time, discovering mission-critical applications, and improving system performance by adding resources. PowerPivot for SharePoint consists of the following components:
- PowerPivot Gallery – a Silverlight based gallery where users can share PowerPivot applications with others and visualize and interact with applications produced by others using Excel Services and Reporting Services.
- PowerPivot Management Dashboard – a dashboard that enables IT to monitor and manage the PowerPivot for SharePoint environment.
- PowerPivot Web Service – the “front-end” service that exposes PowerPivot data via XML/A to external applications such as Report Builder.
- PowerPivot System Service – the “back-end” service that manages the PowerPivot application database, load balancing, usage data collection, automatic data refresh, etc.
- Analysis Services – the Analysis Services server running the VertiPaq in-memory engine and integrated with SharePoint to load and manage the data within PowerPivot workbooks.
We’ll drill into these features in the next few blogs. Stay tuned!
A pair of tips for working with queries
Today’s Power Tip comes from Brandon with OpenGate Software, offering Microsoft Access products for Access users of ever experience level, including UI Builder, Designer, and Dashboard Builder for Microsoft Access.
Here are two tricks in Access to make SQL easier. The background context is that often it makes more sense to put queries in code rather than save them as query objects, particularly if you don’t want users to have access to them, or don’t want to manage hundreds of queries. Ms office 2007 are so Charismatic.
Tip #1: Use the Query Design wizard to create your SQL statement. Rather than memorize all the nuance of SQL to write Docmd.RunSQL statements, you can use the Access Query Designer to visually design your most complicated queries, then copy the resulting SQL into your code. Here’s how:
a. Create a new query in Access using the wizard, or just the Query Design view.
b. If you need to replace a portion of the SQL with a variable from code, you can put a placeholder in the query design. As shown below, we’ve put 9999 in the Criteria for CustomerID. We’ll replace that later with a variable in code. Office Professional 2007 and Office Ultimate 2007 are my favorite.
c. Select “SQL” from the list of options at the bottom right of the screen.
d. Now we’ve got our very long and ugly SQL statement. Part of the benefit is we’re selecting on the fields we need, which means Access will run more efficiently if you’re running the query over a network to a remove database on a file or SQL server. QuickBooks 2010 is so Helpful!
e. Copy the SQL statement and paste into your VB Docmd.RunSQL statement. You’ll receive a number of error messages just because you need to be sure to correctly format the statement. Wherever there is a line break, add the end quote, an underscore, and then a beginning quote for the next line. Note that if you have any criteria with quotes, you’ll need to add another quote. So "Active" would become ""Active"" as shown below.
f. Lastly, if you added a placeholder parameter like we did in step b above, you can now introduce your variable reference. As shown below, we have a parameter lngCustomerID that is passed into the function. In the example, we replaced 9999 with " & lngCustomerID & "
Tip #2: Use the Query Design view to troubleshoot SQL in code. The reverse of #1, I often have times where I’ve written some SQL, and make a change that breaks it. One of the easiest ways to diagnose the problem is to copy the SQL from code, paste it into the Query Designer, and see what may be the problem. Acrobat 9 is so useful! For action queries (make table, append, update, delete), change them to Select Queries in the Query Designer to see whether or not your query will actually return any rows, and find the root cause of the problem.