Today is the 8th day of the 8th month of the 8th year of the 2000’s. You may be aware China scheduled the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics for 8 minutes and 8 seconds past 8 o’clock today becuase of the luck associated with the number in their culture. At any rate, Microsoft and Search Server are providing some assistance to the Olympics through their INFO 08 platform that allows searching athlete bios.
If Microsoft had better relationships in China, they might have delayed the announcement of SQL Server 2008 RTM to today to take advantage of the same luck. I am very curious to get hands on with the new release bits of the product and test out it’s integration with SharePoint.
I’d especially like to see if the Business Intelligence enhancements in 08 make Reporting Services Integration with SharePoint easier to implement and manage. I’ve seen a number of companies struggle with the requirements, including Kerberos configuration, in the past.
One great example was given at last month’s SASUG presentation by Food Safety Net Services. Their new extranet is a great example of the power of SharePoint and SQL Server integration points. However, they were hampered by the configuration complexity and issues with hyperlink translations. The workaround was to move all of the database services to the same box as all of the SharePoint services at a loss of scalability.
It would be greate if these barriers to entry were removed and more orginizations could take advantage of the rich reporting and analysis services that have been a part of SQL Server since their introduction through a Service Pack in the 2000 version of the product.
What do you think? Did Microsoft leverage the new SharePoint platform as promised with this new product release? I’d love to hear your thoughts on and experiences with SQL Server 2008 in the comments or by email!
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