Anith Gopal

Jon Arnold, managing director for power & utilities at Microsoft just shared with us a great summary of Convergence 2011 in Atlanta. He talks about Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Power & utilities organizations and share some of the highlights from the session he did with Doug Jones, Director – Solutions Engineering, Convergys “Doug highlighted how utilities today could learn more from their customer interactions, including how their customers want to interact with their Utility provider. To better serve the customer, Utilities need to implement what he calls “ Dynamic Decisioning ” Taking action on historical and real-time events and providing products and programs to meet the consumer demands, including the ability to interact differently with customers by using SMS, Email, Social Networking (Twitter, Face Book, etc.).

A couple of weeks ago, NetworkWorld published an article indicating that the .com TLD was the riskiest TLD in terms of containing code that can steal passwords or take advantage of browser vulnerabilities to distribute malware.  Here’s an excerpt: Security vendor McAfee analyzed more than 27 million Web sites for its report, "Mapping the Mal Web." Under its scoring method, 31.3% of .com Web sites analyzed are considered risky for malware distribution and attack code. That makes .com the No. 1 riskiest top-level domain (TLD), vaulting it to first place ahead of last year’s winner,  Cameroon’s country code top-level domain, .cm.  In addition to .com, the top five riskiest TLDs accordng to McAfee are: .info with 30.7% of Web sites presenting security risks, followed by .vn (Vietnam) at 29.4%, .cm (Cameroon) at 22.2% and .am (Armenia) at 12.1%.

Troubleshooting LogReader Error “repldone log scan occurs before the current start of replication” Chris Skorlinski Microsoft SQL Server Escalation Services Below are cause and recommendation for the SQL Replication LogReader error “The specified LSN (…) for repldone log scan occurs before the current start of replication in the log (…).’. When the LogReader starts, it verifies the Last Distributed transaction (last transaction in msrepl_transactions) still exists in the transaction log.  This confirms the Published database transaction log and the Distribution database match and that the last replicated transaction did make it to the Distribution database. 2010-04-11 18:23:34.437 Publisher: {call sp_repldone ( 0x00046399000076f80009, 0x00046399000076f80009, 0, 0)} 2010-04-11 18:23:34.515 Status: 0, code: 20011, text: ‘The process could not execute ‘sp_repldone/sp_replcounters’ on ‘SQL5′.’

Convergence 2010 , the premier Microsoft Dynamics conference is here shortly (April 24-27) and this year the event is organized a little differently, beginning on a weekend and with a virtual partner day.

<violins>I am sitting here with my grey matter dribbling out of my ears. Not a pretty mental picture I’ll grant you but relatively accurate in presentation. The thing I think we in these positions do not pay sufficient homage to is the effect that rapid changes in time zone have on our psychology and physiology.

Earlier this month, Microsoft participated in the five day IHE interoperability testing in Chicago – aka NA Connectathon – with our open source XDS.b Registry and Repository Solution Accelerator on CodePlex that you can access from the Health ICT Resource Center at http://www.microsoft.com/healthict .   We successfully tested both Document Registry and Document Repository Actors with the Asynchronous Web Services Exchange Option and the associated HITSP specs T15, T16, T17 and TP13b.

I have a pretty low bandwidth twitter feed at http://www.twitter.com/davescruggs . I’ll eventually put the twitter link off of the blog….( read more )

Here’s the link to the SkyDrive folder holding the presentation materials. There are a few slides in the decks that are from last week—I’ll probably update the overall decks over the weekend. The only difference is slightly older “branding”, since a couple of product names changed slightly

To assist you with determining if you have documents that may be affected by the recent court ruling on Custom XML and Word 2007 ( more info here ) we have released a tool that will scan your .docx and .docm files to determine if they contain Custom XML markup or not.  You can get more info and the tool, including source, from this post by Gray Knowlton.

MSDN geekSpeaks return in January with two fantastic guests. Wednesday, January 6 – SQL Azure Under the Hood with Chris Rolon In this episode of geekSpeak, Chris Rolon gives us a look under the hood of Microsoft SQL Azure to see how was constructed

This has been brewing in the Atlanta community for years.  We started an Integration user group a few years ago, but now we have something finally moving.  Thanks to CTS for helping us get started!  I have attached the invitation below. ********************************* Finally just what we have all been waiting for!  A BizTalk Server User Group in Atlanta!  Come Join Us as we kick off the New Year with a New User Group. We will discuss the Features of BizTalk Server 2009…( read more )