How to Implement SCRUM in 10 easy steps

Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for agile software development. Although Scrum was intended for management of software development projects, it can be used to run software maintenance teams, or as a general project/program management approach.

There are several implementations of systems for managing the Scrum process, which range from yellow stickers and whiteboards, to software packages. One of Scrum’s biggest advantages is that it is very easy to learn and requires little effort to start using.

Here's one nicely plotted at http://bit.ly/bGQNd1

Hands-on Entity Framework

Object-relational mapping or O/RM is a technique which creates a virtual database you can use from inside of your application, where, instead of tables of “things”, there are collections of “objects”. And an object can be a Person, a Car, a Record Album, an Invoice, whatever it is your application is working with. For example, a Record Album has a collection, or list, of tracks. And, for the most part, only has one Artist or Band. On the flip side, an Artist or Band has a list of Record Albums they have recorded. At its heart, what an O/RM does is to map database tables, and its relations, into a set of objects, or classes. This allows you to think in the context of your application, instead of how to make the data fit correctly into the tables.

Originally posted in simple-talk, click here to read more...

Laying out SQL Code

It is important to ensure that SQL code is laid out the best way for the team that has to use and maintain it. Before you work out how to enforce a standard, one has to work out what that standard should be for the application. So do you dive into detail or create an overall logic to the way it is done?

Click here for the full article

Successfully Closeout a Project

Project Closeout is sometimes perceived as the least important of all of the project phases, but its value to future projects cannot be underestimated. The purpose of Project Closeout is to assess the project and derive any lessons learned and best practices to be applied to future projects.

To explore more, click here: http://bit.ly/9W3oqs

Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 VMs

2010 Information Worker Demonstration Virtual Machine (Beta) is a set of Virtual Machines focused on Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. Although the VMs bring to the table a range of technologies, fact is that the downloads are intended to simplify the evaluation and demonstration of the next iteration of Office and SharePoint. 


“Virtual machine “a” contains the following pre-configured software: 

1. Windows Server 2008 SP2 Standard Edition x64, running as an Active Directory Domain Controller for the “CONTOSO.COM” domain with DNS and WINS 
2. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP2 Enterprise Edition with Analysis, Notification, and Reporting Services 
3. Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 R2 
4. Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Ultimate Edition 
5. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition Beta 2 
6. Microsoft Office Web Applications Beta 2 
7. FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 
8. Microsoft Project Server 2010 Beta 2 
9. Microsoft Office 2010 Beta 2 
10. Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2,” Microsoft revealed. 

“Virtual machine “b” contains the following pre-configured software: 

1. Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Evaluation Edition x64, joined to the “CONTOSO.COM” domain 
2. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Active directory has been preconfigured over 200 “demo” users with metadata in an organizational structure. All of these user profiles have been imported and indexed for search within SharePoint Server 2010, with “contoso\administrator” granted administrator permissions. SharePoint Server 2010 has been configured in a “Complete” farm using Kerberos authentication and the default SQL Server 2008 instance for data, and has a site collection created using the Team Site template and a FAST Search Center,” the company added. 

Downloads link: http://bit.ly/bM3TjF

Version 2 of PEAF (Pregmatic Enterprise Architecture Framework)

A vendor and consultancy independent, technology neutral, Enterprise Architecture Framework which allows organisations to kick start or re-start an EA initiative and provides a comprehensive set of Products and Processes of everything required to hit the ground running.

PEAF bridges the gap between minimal "EA Frameworks" which do not provide a complete set of what is required or huge monolithic “EA Frameworks” that are too difficult to understand and difficult to use.

At the highest level, when compared to existing “EA Frameworks”, PeaF is smaller and less complex, whilst being easier to use and covering more of the scope of EA.

Link: http://www.pragmaticea.com/v2preview.asp

9 essential responsibilities of a Product Owner

The role of Product Owner is demanding although not always well defined. This article at Knowledgegenes explores 9 essential responsibilities that a Product Manager must embrace.


http://www.knowledgegenes.com/home.aspx?kgid=10102

Tunnelpoint: The BDC for SharePoint in the Cloud

A hosted service: connects external services (for example SOAP web services) to SharePoint List data in SharePoint Site.

Tunnelpoint Pitch

View more presentations from tunnelpoint.

Self Service BI in Excel 2010 and Sharepoint

Excel is no doubt a great tool in large and small bussinesses. Excel’s ease of use lets users build their own tool, with or without the help of a IT expert. In my organization, Excel spreadsheets play essential role in the day-to-day functions of the business, such as trading in the stock market and managing their portfolios, calculating complex financial formulae, etc. However, these spreadsheets are fragile, do not adopt to changing business requirements, and need constant maintenance. And the scary thing is that only one person (in most cases) — the spreadsheet’s creator—really understand how the application works. Sometimes this might make the creator a bottleneck to the business workflow. In worst case scenarios, business function could halt if the creator were unavailable for some reason or if the application were corrupted or accidentally deleted, and could be very serious, especially if there were a major problem restoring the application.


PowerPivot for Excel 2010 in SQL Server 2008 R2 managed self-service business intelligence (BI)  (formerly known by its code name “Gemini”) [ more about PowerPivot at http://www.powerpivot.com ] can handle such situations. It empowers both IT and business users - the business users get to solve business problems with his/her familiar Excel and the IT team has the ability to centrally store, secure, and distribute the Excel spreadsheets throughout the organization using SharePoint.


The Excel component in Office 2010 uses a new storage engine which is built on the SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) OLAP engine. The new engine uses extreme data compression, and it enables Excel to work with hundreds of millions of rows with subsecond response time. 


The following blog post describes how to use PowerPivot in Excel 2010.
http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2009/10/23/using-powerpivot-with-excel-2010.aspx

Powerpoint (PPT), Acrobat (PDF) and SWF slides from slideshare.net

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