Big Data, Events, SharePoint

Boston SharePoint Salon: Go Big or Go Home

Big as in data, home as in “out of business.” Because there’s only going to be more data, and people are finally realizing that not only can it be sliced and diced and visualized in formats comprehensible to the business analyst—it needs to be. The questions are: how should it be stored and queried and where should the visible representations of these queries be displayed?

Hadoop, Apache’s open source, distributed computing and storage framework based on Google’s MapReduce model is one answer to the first question. Or you could buy a supercomputer, but, those are kind of expensive! And less fun to say!  As for the second question, of course the answer depends on the type of data. As this is a SharePoint-focused Salon, though, I’m going to nominate SharePoint as one potential answer. Why? Well, Microsoft’s new Big Data Solution will put enterprise Hadoop solutions on Azure and Windows Server, including the now available SQL Server Connector, which lets you transfer data between Hadoop and SQL Server.  So, if you plan on upgrading to SQL Server 2012, you’ll be able to access data stored in Hadoop from SharePoint, and do all your slicing and dicing and displaying in PowerPivot and Power View. Presumably.

Interesting, no? We think so. If you agree, please join us at Tico (Berklee Street) this Thursday, from 7 to about 9:30 pm. You can RSVP here, or email me! And if you can’t make it, but know someone whom you think should attend, please spread the word!

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Women In Tech

National Girls Collaborative Institute Days 2-3 Recap

As mentioned in the first recap (which obviously you, my slavishly devoted readers, read), I’m in Tucson for the National Girls Collaborative Institute. Why? Because as someone with a growing interest in and passion for STEM education, I wanted to learn about the nuts and bolts of a project whose collaborative model has enabled and connected girl-focused STEM organizations across the country. And also, because NGCP asked me to speak about using social media as a community builder. And also because I work for a cool company that lets me go to these sorts of things.

Anyways, when I left off yesterday, I was about to go to a dinner/laser show at the University of Arizona’s Flandrau Science Center, which contains a planetarium, telescope, mineral museum and marine discovery center. If any of you are ever in Tucson, I definitely recommend going–U of A is justifiably famous for its geology and astronomy programs, and the Science Center is staffed with fervently knowledgeable geologists, gemologists, marine biologists and astronomers, plus a staggering amount of Wulfenite. The lazer show was set to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, I ate empanadas and nitroglycerin ice cream, Tucson is famous for its mid-century neon signs, sea cucumbers spew their guts into predators’ faces as a last resort, Jupiter shone bright and poor little Io is melting. (Want to work for SoftArtisans? We’re hiring.) Continue reading National Girls Collaborative Institute Days 2-3 Recap →

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Office Life

A Departmental-Based IT Strategy

Traditionally, a disconnect exists between IT and business operations. Departments don’t understand IT processes and IT doesn’t understand departmental workflow and procedures. Committees, task forces, and “super teams” may remedy this issue on a short term basis for a joint project where both sides receive a narrow view into each other’s underpinnings, but focus can be lost after project implementation as both parties shift attention to new priorities.

The solution to this problem may be simple. Each department or several combined departments, depending on company size, employ dedicated IT personnel to service their IT needs. This strategy does not remove the need for a centralized IT department. Core IT services (i.e. email, networking, hardware, security) need to remained centralized to ensure operational consistency across the organization. Instead, departmental IT Pros will implement and directly support departmental applications, cloud based or otherwise. They will be the bridge between the department and IT when projects require internal IT resources. Most of all they will posses integral departmental knowledge and savvy IT wisdom that will help drive future business directives while breaking down the business IT barrier.

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Women In Tech

National Girls Collaborative Institute Days 1-2 Recap

[Photo credit: Karen Peterson]

Greetings from the desert of the real, otherwise known as downtown Tucson, AZ. It’s my first visit to the Grand Canyon State, and I’ve been really struck by the size of the sky and the sepianess of its light. And all the cacti and sagebrush. But mostly, I’ve been struck by the efficacy, sensibility and change-affecting potential of the National Girls Collaborative Project‘s collaborative model. In a nutshell, for those of you unfamiliar with the organization, the NGCP is a national, NSF-funded project comprised of regional/state collaboratives comprised of girl-serving STEM organizations. Through their website, conferences and this annual institute, the national NGCP assists and educates the regional collaboratives in finding, funding and raising awareness about their local organizations. It’s a fantastic model, and one, that, as I tweeted yesterday, reminds me of Hadoop’s: tap into the resources of many through a central hub, maximizing output and minimizing waste.

Continue reading National Girls Collaborative Institute Days 1-2 Recap →

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Office Life

The Charitable Locavore: 5 Boston NonProfits Worth Donating To

I returned from vacation today to find my neighborhood newly populated with balsams, Christmas lights and the gentle clang of the Salvation Army Santa’s bell. While that and other national charitable organizations are certainly worthy benefactors of your Christmas/Hannucka/Kwanza spirit, why not consider donating to a local nonprofit instead/ in addition? What Boston’s nonprofit landscape lacks in quantity, it more than makes up for in innovation, accessibility and creativity, as the following five nonprofits demonstrate. Each offers multiple avenues of involvement, easy-to-use websites and visible and visible and tangible testaments of your impact.

1.) Cauzoom: On this “Community Cause Marketing” site, you get to pick or start a project, contribute directly, via giftcard or by spreading awareness. Recent projects include holiday gifts for foster children and their families in Woburn, art supplies for the Brookline Arts Center and the Northeast Animal Shelter Senior Visitation program in Salem.

Continue reading The Charitable Locavore: 5 Boston NonProfits Worth Donating To →

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Big Data

30 Hadoop and Big Data Spelunkers Worth Following

Understanding the basic purpose of Hadoop is easy: it offers a way to quickly store, process and extract deliverable meaning(s) from vast datasets. It does this by breaking the datasets up into commodity-server-sized chunks, replicating these to reduce failure, and sending them out to a connected web (cluster) of commodity servers (nodes) . Understanding how it can integrate with the current big data landscape and may integrate with the future one is a little harder—for that, I’ve turned to the experts. Luckily for me, and for you, if you’re in my boat, many of them maintain active twitter and blogging presences. Even more luckily, the quality and clarity of writing is really, really high. The following list is by no means exhaustive, but poking into the thoughts of even a few can elucidate everything from machine learning to data modeling and distributed systems.

1.) Hilary Mason

Continue reading 30 Hadoop and Big Data Spelunkers Worth Following →

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SSRS

Post-Processing SSRS Reports using OfficeWriter in .NET

Using OfficeWriter‘s integration with SSRS in conjunction with the Designer is typically a straightforward process with no programmatic manipulation of the reports. A developer designs the report in Visual Studio BIDS, opens the .rdl using the Designer, designs the template in Word/Excel, and publishes the report. The report is then rendered inside the Report Manager using the custom OfficeWriter export option. However, there are times that situations call for post-processing the report programmatically and that’s where the ExcelApplication and WordApplication objects come in. Accessing and rendering the reports through the SSRS API is straightforward and the resulting byte array can be turned into a MemoryStream and passed to OfficeWriter.

Adding the SSRS Web Service

The first step necessary to tapping into the SSRS API is to add the Report Execution Service to your web references inside of Visual Studio. The URL for the web service is likely along the lines of *http://localhost/reportserver/reportexecution2005.asmx*, where localhost/reportserver is the hostname and virtual directory of the SSRS server. Note that this is for SQL Server 2008, despite the 2005. This web service is located in the directory C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSRS10.MSSQLSERVER\Reporting Services\ReportServer in the example instance I am using. Continue reading Post-Processing SSRS Reports using OfficeWriter in .NET →

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Excel

Create an Excel Spreadsheet in Powershell

This post shows you how to create an excel spreadsheet in Powershell with OfficeWriter.

PowerShell

##################################################################

##

## Create an Excel Spreadsheet with ExcelApplication in Powershell ##

## by Jim Stallings (http://www.officewriter.com)

##

##################################################################

# Add the assembly Add-Type -Path ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\SoftArtisans\OfficeWriter\bin\dotnet\SoftArtisans.OfficeWriter.ExcelWriter.dll‘

# Create a new ExcelApplication object

$xla = New-Object “SoftArtisans.OfficeWriter.ExcelWriter.ExcelApplication”

# Create a new workbook

$wb = $xla.Create()

# Add a worksheet to the workbook

$ws = $wb.Worksheets[0]

# Add some text to the first cell in the sheet

$ws.Cells[‘A1’].Value = “Welcome to SoftArtisans OfficeWriter!”

# Save the workbook to disk

$xla.Save($wb, “C:\myfile.xls“)

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Women In Tech

Stories from the WIT Trenches: Stacia Misner

[This is the sixth in a series of posts exploring the personal stories of real women in technology. Every woman in tech overcame at the very last statistical odds to be here; this blog series aims to find out why, and what they found along the way. Those of you who work in the SQL Server BI arena are mostly likely familiar with Stacia Misner— the consultant, instructor and prolific author is one of  the MS BI stack’s greatest champions. Here, she talks tractors, the SQLBI community’s collective consciousness and growing up in the stars. For guidance and in-depth tutorials on all things SQL Server, SSRS, SharePoint and BI, check out Stacia’s blog and books! And if reading her story inspires you to share yours, please feel to email me.]

I’m Stacia Misner, a business intelligence consultant, author, and instructor specializing in the Microsoft business intelligence stack. I have been working in the business intelligence field since 1999 and started my own consulting company in 2006.

1)      Can you take us back to your “eureka!” moment—a particular instance or event that got you interested in technology?

I’ve always been interested in technology in one way or another. My parents were both programmers, although I don’t recall growing up thinking that I would follow in their footsteps. I was always very good at math and science, and was properly encouraged in those areas. I had the privilege of growing up in Houston, in the heart of the space industry, so all my friends’ parents (mostly fathers at the time, I suppose) were engineers or scientists. Technology seemed a normal part of life, and my friends and I grew up expecting that it would become more and more like Star Trek as time went on. Continue reading Stories from the WIT Trenches: Stacia Misner →

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