Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Chart Advisor is a prototype that provides an alternate approach for creating charts in Excel 2007. This add-in uses an advanced rules engine to scan your data and, based on predefined rules, displays charts according to score. Top scoring charts are available for you to preview, tweak, and insert into your Excel worksheet.

• Requirements:
  32 bit Windows XP or Windows Vista. Excel 2007.
• Limitations:
  English only. Analysis limited to 8,000 cells.
• Last updated:
  08/20/2008

FAQ – get answers to frequently asked questions
Blog – read the latest news from the team
Discussions – connect with other users

DOWNLOAD:
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/chartadvisor/Pages/default.aspx

Simply from an enthusiast standpoint, one of the benefits of working for the same company that manufactures the Xbox 360 is that we occasionally get little perks.

We have this semi-annual training and besides the party that gets thrown toward the end of the event, one of the things we get the opportunity to enjoy is a large ‘video game extravaganza’.

Every lab machine for example gets turned into a Windows PC Game machine were we get to play numerous games like Age of Empires 3, Gears of War for PC, or Halo 2 for PC.  (Yes, every single person in this photo is playing one of our PC games.  There’s hundreds of PCs and trust me:  It’s sheer delirious & delicious chaos.)

But in several large convention center rooms, we also have lots and lots of Xbox 360’s set up along with flat screens & speakers.  One of the rooms is dedicated to a monster sized Halo 3 Tournament with prizes and all – and the lead player is highlighted on a monster projection screen on the wall.  But in another large room there’s a ton of very ‘interesting’ games to play… and as you can see by the photo, there was a lot of good fun to be had.

Like I said… occasional perks.

The Microsoft Environmental Sustainability blog has an interesting post that goes over how to use Windows Vista’s out-of-box power management capabilities, including:

• Sleep/Hibernate policy
• Differences between Vista & XP
• Device level management

It’s chock full of links.  Check it out at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/see/archive/2008/
08/11/unleashing-power-management-features-in-windows-vista.aspx

This was something that was brought to my attention by the Management blog at Microsoft and I have to agree that it’s a very cool technical overview of how NBCOlympics.com was created using Silverlight & Windows Media.

Eric Schmidt actually answered several questions as posted in the comments section of this Channel 9 video post which makes it doubly cool.

VIDEO:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Continuum/
Building-NBCOlympicscom-with-Silverlight/

We’re sponsoring a new site called "OpsManJam" that has the explicit charter of focusing on Management Pack authoring best practices and tutorials for System Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM2007), so if you intend on creating your own Management Packs for your internal applications or for your own purposes, you will definitely want to check this site out:

http://www.opsmanjam.com/

There are also guidelines for deploying and administering Management Packs for SCOM2007 as well so if you’re an IT Pro, you’re definitely going to want to check this out.

There will be downloadable content including:

• Management Packs
• Feature Articles
• Command Shell scripts

The best part is the that site features a great Sharepoint enabled Search tool to find the things you need, and the content will be constantly updated by Microsoft Consulting Services, our Support organization, and the Product Team itself.

First of all, if you don’t have System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (SCCM2007) skip this post, unless you plan on moving to it from an existing SMS 2003 (R2) installation sometime in the near future.

If you do, you’re in luck:  We released a new SCCM 2007 Desired Configuration Management pack that essentially allows you to help ensure that your systems are adhering to Energy Star guidelines, free of charge.

…in other words, it’ll help you save money by minimizing energy use on your computers.

Here’s a quick sample of what the management pack detects, reports on, and compares against US EPA guidelines:

• Stand by or Hibernate is enabled after 30-60 minutes of inactivity
• Monitor enters sleep after 5-20 minutes of inactivity
• Screen savers are disabled; if enabled, time out should be less than monitor sleep setting

Desired Configuration Management packs install into SCCM2007 to provide turn key functionality & value.

DOWNLOAD: 
http://www.microsoft.com/environment/campaign_energy_star.aspx

Yeah, you read that right. 

The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) chose Sharepoint Server 2007 as the search platform to power their INFO 2008 database… over Google Search Appliance.

INFO 2008 is a database of content to enable all Olympic partners and media to "present, promote, and report" on the 29th Summer Olympics.

For more detailed information about the implementation and how it’s used, check out the formal case study at:
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000002332

For the official announcement & other media write ups about the implementation:

• Sharepoint Forum
  http://www.sharepointforum.com/en-US/Lists/General%20announcements/DispForm.aspx?ID=40&RootFolder=%2Fen%2DUS%2FLists%2FGeneral%20announcements
• PC World
  http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/149541/microsoft_sharepoint_powers_olympics_portal.html
• Windows IT Pro
  http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/99971/sharepoint-goes-to-the-olympics.html
• ECM Connection
  http://www.ecmconnection.com/article.mvc/Microsoft-SharePoint-powering-Olympics-portal-0001?VNETCOOKIE=NO
• Office & Sharepoint Pro
  http://www.officesharepointpro.com/content/1935/sharepoint-sharing-from-beijing.aspx

Unless you’ve been in a hole, you know that SQL Server 2008 released to manufacturing and has been popping up all over the place along with VERY IMPORTANT pre-requisites to getting SQL Server 2008 installed. 

Here are a few of the announcements about the availability of the bits on various sites:

• Technet Subscribers: 
  SQL Server 2008 RTM now available on TechNet Plus
• MSDN Subscribers: 
  SQL Server 2008 Now Available on Subscriber Downloads
• SQL Server Express: 
  SQL Server 2008 Express is now live!
• Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Req for SQL Server 2008 installers that have VS2008 installed):
  Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Now Available
• SQL Server Compact v3.5 SP1:
  Released – SQL Server Compact v3.5 SP1, SQL Server 2008 RTM, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, .NET Framework v3.5 SP1
• SQL Server 2008 Books Online:
  SQL Server 2008 Books Online Now Available
• Migrating to SQL Server 2008 using MAP Toolkit 3.1
  Get Ready to Migrate to SQL Server 2008 with Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 3.1

Hi there.  I’m Kurt.  Y’know?  The guy that used to post to this blog but has been a ghost for a very long time.  Nice to see you.  How’ve you been?

In all seriousness, I had an absolutely astounding vacation.  (See my other blog for details)  So good that I’m already planning a shorter version of the same vacation (over a weekend with a Friday added on or something) sometime in September already.  Half of me reeeeeeally doesn’t want to come back, but alas, there is work to be done and people that depend on said work so hi ho, hi ho.

It’s gonna take me a bit to get back into the the swing of things so I ask for you patience.  I have a mail box with 440 unread.  I left with 20 unread and I was actually whittling down email on my phone while I was sitting by the pool at the Wynn.

So over the next week, I’ll hopefully be posting a MASSIVE amount of crap that happened over the last couple weeks.  You can look forward to:

• New product releases & betas
• New company announcements & acquisitions
• New tools & utilities
• Announced training & webcasts
• Interesting posts that I’ve encountered

Hopefully, I can caught up.  Otherwise there’s gonna be a lot that goes unmentioned.  But I have a big pot of coffee here so hopefully, I’ll stay focused.