Steven Wright Blog

I have been working with a couple of colleagues, James Dawson and Russell Seymour , on installing and configuring PowerPivot within a SharePoint 2010 beta 2 farm. We used the following instructions to install PowerPivot on one of the application tier server: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210616(SQL.105).aspx . After following the instructions we were able to verify the installation as we had a SharePoint site with PowerPivot gallery.  We managed to uploaded and open a couple of Excel workbooks, with PowerPivot embedded, within the web browser.  Also we were able to connect to the PowerPivot service and could see the PowerPivot data files loaded. When I tested the slicers I got greeted with the following error: We did some research and found the following blog post: http://powerpivotgeek.com/2009/12/11/excel-services-delegation/ .  I implemented the changes it recommended to our Excel workbooks and tried again this time getting the following error: However at th

I recently had to investigated a client replication topology.  I needed to understand the publications, subscribers and the articles. The problems I was facing were as follows: The replication topology was only defined on the production infrastructure. There was no documentation about the replication topology. I had no way of being able re-create replication topology. Only short amount of time. I was able to script the replication topology from the SQL Server Management Studio.  This was partially helpful as I now had a script which could be used to review the replication topology.  However this end up being a fairly large file and would be time consuming to review all information.  So I deicide to write a PowerShell, SQL Server Powershell for the Invoke-Sqlcmd commandlet, that would do the following steps: Parse the file to find the lines containing the following store procedures: sp_addarticle. sp_addsubscription. As theses contain

The Scrum for Team System process template includes reports to help manage the progress of project.  The onus is on the team to run - by opening them - and review them.  This is the default behaviour of the Team Foundation Server which our process template built against, however as the Team Foundation Server platform uses SQL Server Reporting Services for its reporting software, the reports can actually be pushed out to the teams via e-mail.  I have mentioned how to do this for version 2.x, and for version 1.x the same steps can be applied, with the following post:  How to E-mail the Sprint Burndown Chart to yourself or your team. For version 3.0 (For which beta 2 is now available for download from the following link: http://scrumforteamsystem.com/cs/forums/4554/ShowPost.aspx ) things are a little different. Firstly, if not already configured, the Reporting Services server will need to will need to be set up to point to an SMTP server. This can be done by using the Reporting Se