For most organizations, aligning IT systems with the core business is a goal that always seems to be just out of reach. I speak with clients every day who are on this common, age-old quest. Most ask the same two questions: “What is the best way to align IT with business? And where should we start?” There are no hard and fast answers, but an asset-centric approach to information management can help rationalize any organization's IT environment.

One of the coolest features unique to SharePoint Online is the ability to share sites with external users. I’ve noticed the functionality was there throughout the beta but I believe I hadn’t actually been able to get it to work until GA. Even then, it took checking a number of settings before I could actually get it to work.

There is a lot of conversation and hubbub about the release of ITIL 2011. Is it a new version? Is it just minor changes? Are there new processes? Have some processes been removed? Well, there is good news and . . . more good news!

I’ve been working with BMC Remedy for 17 years, and from time to time come upon version upgrade challenges that I’m sure others are seeing with their own projects. Recently, I had to determine if there was a way to migrate data from a source server to a target server on a company–by-company basis during an ITSM 7.6.04 upgrade using the Delta Data Manager, as this is not a BMC-supported approach. This concept has recently been proven effective in an upgrade from a 7.1 source to a 7.6.04 target server although the setup to accomplish this is manual.

From a database administration perspective, solid-state drive technology represents a solution for a “resource hog” application and can significantly improve the app’s performance and scalability beyond the software vendor's specification. It can also overcome SQL Server’s metadata-locking limitations related to bulk inserts. For one Stonebridge client, implementation of solid-state drive technology allowed business users to exceed the software vendor's limitations and eliminate SQL Server outages.

Much like how tools accumulate over time in your garage, an organization's BI tools are acquired over time from a variety of sources. Every situation is different when it comes to addressing BI capability overlap and tool redundancy, and I’ve seen organizations move in every possible direction amongst the main tool vendors. Still, several key principles should be applied in all cases.

In my last post, PowerPivot: A Cool Way to Prototype, I talked about the importance to prototyping a BI solution as well as consideration for using PowerPivot as a tool for developing a prototype solution. In this post, I’d like to discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of using PowerPivot as a prototyping tool for PerformancePoint dashboards and other Analytic Reporting solutions.

I recently had an inquiry from one of our clients. They have an Oracle database, the entire data model is in a single schema with a single username. They have recently started adding additional reporting users and roles to their business, but that has not been reflected in the database yet. The developer asked me whether it was better to have a single read-only user or a set of different users. The answer, as with most IT-related queries, is: “it depends”.

It happens to the best of us. Sometimes, we just need to start over. A lot of times, I see cases in the forums where it is just easier to reinstall the Search Service Application. This especially applies to new environments or when someone ran the dreaded “wizard” to set up their service applications. This serves as a quick reference guide on how to re-create your Search Service Application.

A while back, a friend pointed out to me that certain web sites could be searched in Google Chrome using the syntax <ur> query in the address bar. For example, once I have been to youtube.com, I can later type in youtube to initiate a search query. As someone that does a lot of work with SharePoint Enterprise Search, this got me thinking.

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to attend a Windows Azure Boot Camp. So this post today is for those of you who haven’t been keeping up and want to know about some of the basics.

SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search has great wildcard search support built in now. However, it requires the use to add an asterisk to their query every time they want a wildcard search. This is a great step compared to what we had in MOSS 2007, but now it results in a training issue. In 2007, many people wrote custom code or relied on the Wildcard Search Web Part that I built. So I thought why not use the QueryManager object to override the query and add an asterisk to the query for the user.

Enterprise Search is one of my favorite SharePoint topics to speak about. Often in my talks, I use various keyword queries to display results that people often end up asking me about. Today, I thought it would be useful to show you some of the most useful built-in keywords that you can use to troubleshoot search results or even build custom scopes with.

Given the analytical and reporting benefits of a well-conceived data warehouse, it is imperative to get it right the first time. You can maximize the success of your data warehousing initiative using industry-standard best practices.

I travel frequently.  Sometimes too much, but the one thing that I look forward to is my time on the plane.  I catch up on items that have not received enough attention during the week, spend time strategizing, work on my Japanese, and my most favorite past time – reading the Wall Street Journal.  There is something soothing about reading The Journal cover to cover, being informed and leveraging ideas from others’ successes or failures.

Over the last 6 months, Stonebridge has been aggressively seizing on a strengthening economy.  We have invested strongly in our people, processes, technology, marketing and sales engine to ensure that we are growing at a strong pace, but are also positioning ourselves for even larger growth in the future.  Through our tightened organizational message and brand, we are driving a stronger focus on specialized, higher-value solutions in the marketplace, while ensuring that we are helping customers achieve their goals.