May 18, 2009 by james.

Acknowledge IT is proud to bring your First Look at Windows 7 to Southwestern Virginia.  We are offering two one-day sessions on Windows 7 and its new features on June 9th and June 10th, 2009.  Topics to be covered include DirectAccess, Bitlocker to Go, BranchCache, Libraries, AppLocker, and many others.  The morning session (Microsoft Course 6289) will include discussion and demonstration of the features, and the afternoon session (Microsoft Course 6290) will have hands-on labs to reinforce your knowledge.

If you sign up for one of these two sessions, we will cut the price to $199 dollars per student.  That’s a 60% discount over our normally daily rates.  Call or e-mail us today for more information, but space is limited and the classes are filling up quickly.

We hope to see you there;

James

Posted in Windows 7, Training, Technology, Company Information | No Comments »

May 18, 2009 by james.

 The first technical book review I’d like to post is for Delivering Business Intelligence with Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

If you are new to Business Intelligence (hereafter referred to as BI) theory, this is not the book for you.  The first chapters do a cursory review of the BI process and theory, but it is no where in depth enough for newcomers to the topic.

However, if you already have a grounding in basic BI concepts like OLAP, Data Marts, Measures, Dimensions, Facts, Star Schemas, Snowflake Schemas, etc. this book shines in walking you step by step in the setup, configuration, and management of basic pieces of Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Services. 

The strength of this book for me was the step-by-step Learn by Doing exercises.  These allowed me to get comfortable with the Business Intelligence Design Studio (BIDS) and its complex user interface.

If you are looking for a hands-on walkthrough of the BI components of SQL Server 2005, this is an excellent book to use.

 Hope this helps someone;

James

Posted in Book Review, Training, SQL Server, Technology | No Comments »

May 18, 2009 by james.

Of course, I can’t go through the week without breaking my own computer.  (Keeping in mind I don’t get paid to fix my own stuff…..)

 My Office 2007 installation has refused updates for a while, each one that attempted to install returned an error stating that I had a corrupted installation database.  I couldn’t repair or uninstall the Office 2007 suite as well.

 Thankfully, my Google searching skills were strong, so I was able to was able to find some success by following the instructions by dlauber in this thread:  http://forums.techarena.in/ms-office-support/729760.htm

 The gist is that you have to go into the registry, open HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products and find the GUIDs corresponding to each MS Office product and component.  Once there, rename or delete the Patches key for each one.  (Yes, I know there’s a large number of them, and yes, I know that I could probably write a script to do it, but I’m not a good enough scripter that I could write the script quicker than doing the manual edits on this one PC.)

To help you find the appropriate GUIDs, on my machine, all of the Office-related GUIDs started with 000021.  (There were a couple of other programs from MS that had GUIDs that started with 000021 as well, but hopefully this will help you narrow the search.)

Now if I just knew what caused this to happen, I’d be in business.  Hopefully this will help someone else out there recover from this error.

 James

Posted in Microsoft Office, Technology | No Comments »