2010 October :: Third Tier

Archive for October 2010

Oct
31

PASS Summit MVP Birds of a Feather Lunch 2010

by edwin

After a few months of inactivity, I'm back to blogging - this time with a purpose. By now, there have been a lot of blog posts about the upcoming PASS Community Summit 2010 in Seattle, WA on the 9th-11th November 2010. This, in particular, has been announced earlier this month but I need to confirm my attendance even before I can blog about it. So, now that my plane tickets and hotel reservations are set, I guess I can say that I am indeed going to PASS this year. And while I am not doing a regular session this time around, I will be at the MVP Birds of a Feather Lunch on the 10th. Keeping up with my commitment to do professional development sessions at PASS (although I will be at the Ask-the-Experts booth on High Availability and Disaster Recovery as well), my topic for the lunch session will be about why you need to distinguish yourself from the rest.

If you're attending the PASS Summit this year, drop by my area and I'll have something for you. For the next couple of days, I will be posting some secret messages on Twitter that give instructions on what you need to bring with you when you drop by. And I'm definitely sure that you'll enjoy having lunch with me because it's all about YOU.

Below is the list of topics for the Birds of a Feather Lunch for the PASS Summit 2010. I got it off Mike Walsh's post on SQLServerPedia so be sure to check out that site as well if there are any changes, although, I'm pretty sure there won't be any at this time.

Allan Hirt SQL Server Manageability Tips for the DBA
Ami Levin Performance Management Tools
Andy Leonard SSIS Frameworks (or design patterns or getting started)
Andy Warren Statistics
Arnie Rowland Community – TechNet Wiki
Brad Schulz Interpretting Query Plans
Bruce Loehle-Conger SSRS Lessons Learned
Chris Webb Performance Tuning SSAS
Christian Bolton Hyper-V with SQL Server
Christopher Shaw Professional Development for the Data Professional
Darren Gosbell SSAS Triple A – Administration, Automation and APIs
Davide Mauri SQL Server & NoSQL Alternatives
Dean Vitner Write-Ahead Logging & The Transaction Log
Denny Cherry SQL Service Broker
Eduardo Castro HA In Virtualized Environments
Edwin Sarmiento Why you need to distinguish yourself from the rest
Erland Sommarskog Practical T-SQL Programming
Geoff Hiten Advanced SQL Clustering
Gianluca Hotz Oracle to SQL Server DBA
Glenn Berry Database Mirroring
Grant Fritchey T-SQL Tuning & Optimization
Greg Galloway What’s the Coolest Business Problem You’ve Solved with a Cube?
Jason Strate Querying The Procedure Cache
Jeff Moden Black Arts T-SQL (Like the Tally Table)
Jessica Moss Fixing Bad Data Using SSIS
Jesus Gil Geo-Spatial Data on SSRS (en espanol)
Jonathan Kehayias VMWare With SQL Server
Justing Langford SQL Server Consolidation
Kevin Boles Performance Tuning
Kevin Kline Help for the involuntary DBA
Louis Davidson Database Design
Michael Coles SQL Encryption (pending ATE schedule question)
Michael Steineke High Performance DBs on Shared Storage
Patrick LeBlanc CDC
Paul Turley BI Tool & Visualization Choices
Peter Ward SQL Server Migration and Upgrade Planning
Plamen Ratchev Implementing Hierarchies in SQL
Rafael Salas PowerPivot: Where/How Are You Using It?
Rob Farley Tables don’t exist, so join me at my index
Scott Klein Data Development in SQL Azure
Sean McCown PowerShell For the SQL Server DBA
Ted Krueger Cheapest DR/HA Options on SQL Server
Tim Chapman SQL Security Best Practices
Tim Mitchell Care and Feeding of your SSIS Infrastructure
Tim Ford DMVs
Todd McDermid Data Warehouse ETL with SSIS
Tomislav Piasevoli The Past, Present and Future of Microsoft BI

Categories : Edwin Sarmiento

Oct
21

October 21, 2010 PSSBS Meeting

by steve

Simplifying High Availability and Virtualization

For those in the Seattle area who are not attending SMB Nation this weekend and Third Tier's Pre-day event in Las Vegas, the Puget Sound Small Business Server User Group October meeting will include a presentation by VM6 Software, a provider of an ‘all in one’ software solution that virtualizes storage, servers and desktops all at the same time, on a single server, without the complexity and costs.

By leveraging Microsoft Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and using any x86-64 servers, VM6 VMex creates a completely virtualized IT infrastructure with the simplest high availability solution in less than three hours without requiring the purchase of a complex SAN. It also comes with its own clustering technology and management console.

VM6 Software is the perfect solution for IT environments that:

• Have less than 50 servers per site

• Have virtualized or have a project to migrate to a virtualized environment

• Require high availability for planned or unplanned downtime

• Have challenges justifying the cost of a SAN

Join us for a presentation that will demonstrate how VM6 VMex can:

· Optimize the capacity utilization of your IT infrastructure

· Simplify and improve IT service availability for small IT environments

· Eliminate the need for shared storage (SAN)

John Cloutier (VM6 Software Technical Evangelist) and Bruce Smith (Microsoft Alliance Manager and Business Development) will be presenting.

VM6 will be providing pizza for the group, and Microsoft will be providing the room and drinks. Will be at our usual location, at Microsoft’s Lincoln Square offices in downtown Bellevue (700 Bellevue Way NE - Lincoln Square, Bellevue, WA 98004).

Park in the Lincoln Square garage and meet at the elevators on the first floor by 6 PM to head up to the meeting (take a ticket when you enter the garage, but parking will be free for the evening).

Meeting will be from 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM.

Categories : Hyper-V

Oct
20

Third Thursday Webinar is Tomorrow! Sign Up Now

by amy

Configuring and Using Remote Services Remote Desktop Apps – A Love Story

Many people have heard of Remote Desktop Services Remote Apps (formerly Terminal Server Remote Apps) but either haven’t had an opportunity to implement the solution or just are not sure how to. In this session, Eriq Neale will show how to configure RDS Remote Apps on a Remote Desktop Server and then go over several real-world deployment scenarios. We will also go over how to set up RDS Remote Apps to work with Remote Web Workplace on an SBS Server. Eriq will include case studies on when and why this technology is used.

Configuring RDS Remote Apps
Publishing an Application through RDS Remote Apps
Publishing an Application with multiple configuration options through RDS Remote Apps
Publishing an RDS Remote App through Remote Web Workplace

Add to my Outlook Calendar:
https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/harborcomputerservices/meetingICS?id=QBKJ7Q&role=attend&pw=X%29M9cb%3Bcm&i=i.ics

Thursday October 21st – Noon Eastern time

0 Categories : Eriq Neale, Webinar

Oct
19

Microsoft RSS Feeds for Top Issues and Recently Published KB articles

by steve

Microsoft has put together a "landing page" for their RSS feeds. Feeds will be covering the top customer issues and resolutions. Great idea and worthy of checking out and monitoring.

Categories : Uncategorized

Oct
13

Your Free BPOS Accounts are About to Expire, Now What?

by amy

As an early adopter into the BPOS partner program Harbor Computer Services received 250 free accounts to use and commenced testing the service and offering it to some of our existing clients. We also let two of our MVP friends use account for their own beta testing purposes. We used those accounts to not only help our team learn BPOS but we also helped others.

Our target market for this product has been very small companies with under 10 users. We think that hosted Exchange loses appeal to small businesses that are larger than that. We have sold a few and are looking forward to selling some more. However, in order to continue to qualify as a partner with some free accounts to use, Microsoft requires that we sell to companies with 25 seats or more. What’s a small business specialist to do?

This is in response to your e-mail from 10/12/2010. We understand that you have contacted us on how to maintain your Business Productivity Online Suite Subscription and we are happy to assist you. As you may be aware, in order to maintain this Subscription as free of charge, your organization needed to sell two deals of Business Productivity Online Suite that each consist of 25 licenses (seats) or greater the prior year. Unfortunately your organization did not meet the requirement, therefore as an option you can have this particular Subscription to be as a Paid Subscription with Partner Special Pricing of $5.00 per month per user. Before the expiration, please contact us at your earliest convenience and we will decrease licenses quantity accordingly and have our billing specialist apply the Partner pricing to your account.
Should you have any questions, comments or concerns, please feel free to contact us and we will be happy to be of assistance.
Thank you for contacting Microsoft Online Services.

That is the response that we got to our inquire. Not ideal. I would like to see Microsoft support SBSC’s better in this and I would also like to see them invest in companies that are just starting out with BPOS. I guess, what I can say is that it’s better than nothing. I hope that Microsoft Online Services will choose to better support the small business specialist in the future.

—–

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1 Categories : Amy Babinchak, BPOS

Oct
12

Missing your Microsoft Document Imaging in Office 2010?

by steve

If you have been using Microsoft's Office Document Imaging and are wondering where it went in Office 2010, you're not alone. Microsoft has dropped it as of Office 2010, but there is a workaround to install it in Office 2010 by using the Office 2007 version of it. KB with the information is at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982760. If you're still wondering what we're talking about after checking out the Wikipedia article, here's a description of MODI from Microsoft's site.

For those who don't want to click there, here are the directions from KB982760 to run the 2007 version of MODI (as of the date of this Blog post):

How to use MODI in 2007 Office together with Office 2010

To use MODI in 2007 together with Office 2010, use one of the following methods:

If you do not have 2007 Office system installed on a computer that has Office 2010 installed, you can install only MODI from the 2007 Office system setup. To do this, follow these steps:
1. Start the 2007 Office setup process.
2. Click Customize.
3. On the Installation Options tab, select Not Available for all items except for the items under Microsoft Office Document Imaging, and then click Install Now.
4. Click Close.
If you perform a standard upgrade to Office 2010 from 2007 Office, MODI will be removed together with 2007 Office. Therefore, to keep MODI you have to keep the 2007 Office installation. To do this, follow these steps:
1. Start the Office 2010 setup process.
2. Click to select the I accept the terms of this agreement check box, and then click Continue.
3. Click Customize.
4. On the Upgrade tab, click the Keep all previous versions option, and then click Install Now.
5. Click Close.

Categories : Uncategorized

Oct
12

Third Thursday is back and Live from Las Vegas!

by amy

Third Tier is happy to announce the return of its regularly schedule Third Thursday webinars. Mark your calendar for a recurring meeting every Third Thursday at Noon Eastern.

To kick off the new season of webinars we’re going to broadcast Eriq Neale Live from Las Vegas presenting:

Configuring and Using Remote Services Remote Desktop Apps – A Love Story

Configuring RDS Remote Apps
Publishing an Application through RDS Remote Apps
Publishing an Application with multiple configuration options through RDS Remote Apps
Publishing an RDS Remote App through Remote Web Workplace

Add to my Outlook Calendar:
https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/harborcomputerservices/meetingICS?id=QBKJ7Q&role=attend&pw=X%29M9cb%3Bcm&i=i.ics

Thursday October 21st – Noon Eastern time

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0 Categories : Eriq Neale, Webinar

Oct
11

Microsoft Online Services Health Dashboard

by steve

Great news from the Microsoft BPOS Team, especially for those of us in North America who have seemed to end up with the bulk of the "growing pains" of Microsoft's Business Productivity Suite. There is now a "health" dashboard (must have a BPOS account to login and view it) available at the following URLs that will give you a current day and past week's status of all BPOS services. If you click on the links, it gives you some status details.

Americas (NOAM)
https://health.noam.microsoftonline.com/

Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA)
https://health.emea.microsoftonline.com/

Asia-Pacific (APAC)
https://health.apac.microsoftonline.com/

This new tool is in addition to the RSS feeds also provided by the BPOS team: https://rss.microsoftonline.com/

Categories : BPOS

Oct
11

Looking for something to do?

by amy

So you missed out on signing up for our Brain Explosion. All is not lost, the day before SMBNation in Las Vegas is full of great opportunities.

You can check them all out here. http://smbpreday.com/

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0 Categories : SMB Nation

Oct
8

Going, Going, GONE! Third Tier Training is Sold Out!

by amy

We are proud to announce, that the Third Tier Brain Explosion is SOLD OUT. We’re really excited to meet everyone that signed up and make your brains explode.

Because of some happy coincidences I have a couple of announcements.

The cocktail party is back! We’ll be having a welcome reception on Wednesday evening before the big event 6:00-8:30pm. (Yes, that does say FREE BEER.)
Our SMB friendly vendors have bestowed upon us some cool products to give-away to the attendees of the Brain Explosion. (Yes we’re talkin’ product, not swag)
Configuring and Using Remote Desktop Services Remote Apps – A Love Story will be broadcast LIVE! So if you missed getting the hottest ticket in Vegas you can still get a sample of the Brain Explosion.

We will post more information on each of these exciting developments soon. Keep tuned into the blog for the details and we’ll see you in Vegas.

0 Categories : Eriq Neale, Events, SMB Nation

Archive for October 2010

Configuring and Using Remote Services Remote Desktop Apps – A Love Story

How to use MODI in 2007 Office together with Office 2010

Configuring and Using Remote Services Remote Desktop Apps – A Love Story

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