Mr. Aggarwal

Statistics say that one person in every family is considered a fool by their family members.  Think about your family…if you don’t consider one of them fools… – Ashok Aggarwal (offshoot of Rita Mae Brown)

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious. – Peter Ustinov

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. – Jack London

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over. – Aneurin Bevan

…all that most companies do with their IT infrastructure offered for less with Google in an ASP model: 

https://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions.html

Will it catch on in the enterprise?  I’m not sure we will see large organizations switching over just yet.  But, many times, the more cost-conscience small and mid-size business become the test bed for the enterprise and it will be interesting to see how this trend plays out.

Outlook 2007 introduces a new feature that I personally find very useful: attachment previewers.  While reading a message, you can click on an attachment to get a preview of the file directly inside the message (without opening another application for Word, Excel, Images, etc.).  Following are a list of files supported out-of-the-box.

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 items.
Microsoft Office Word 2007 documents.
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 presentations.
Microsoft Office Excel 2007 worksheets.
Microsoft Office Visio 2007 drawings.
Images and text files.

Combine this with flagging and the reading pane which I already used, and I can’t really think of an email management tool on the market that gets anywhere close to Outlook 2007′s efficiency. 

Example
How many times does someone send you pictures that you would love to just quickly view rather than opening them in an image-viewer?  Here is a picture of a .jpg previewer in action.

My opinion, yes.  In the long run, WebCenter is built on the technology that Oracle is promoting and that companies are moving towards.  WebCenter is geared to the Java developer, while non-Java developers can be productive in the Oracle Portal environment.  And although it will take years to completely replace (if ever), I doubt Oralce will invest too much more money in Oracle Portal.  Portlet and portal modularization will occur in WebCenter and content management in new CMS aquisitions made by Oracle.

So, is this good or bad…it depends on who you talk to, but I say indifferent.  Welcome to technology; it changes – RAPIDLY – and vendors like Oracle need to keep up with advanacements in order to continue to land new customers.  And if they play their cards right, they can typically keep enough existing customers during changes like these to make it more than worth it.

Want more insight into what is going on with this technology?  Feel free to contact me.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them. – Isaac Asimov

Taken straight from the SP2 documentation:

“Report model generation from Oracle data sources that run on version 9.2.0.3 or later is supported. You can generate Oracle-based models by using Report Manager, Management Studio, or Model Designer.”

This is huge and wonderful news.  We were connecting SQL Server to Oracle, and then creating models off of the SQL Server tables to accomplish this.  Needless to say, we didn’t do too much of this.  And perhaps more needless to say, we will be using the feature heavily.  I didn’t like that it was not included in the original release of SSRS 2005, but I guess it is one of those things you really appreciate more since you didn’t have it in the first place.  Now to test how well it works…I’m assuming it’ll be fine like most everything we have experienced with SSRS.