Do you need help getting your organization to stick to the facts? Is there lots of data in your organization but hesitation to share it? Be utilizing some Business Intelligence (BI) best practices these problems can be tackled. The power of BI is combining information from various data sources to... [More]

Last Monday Agora hosted a “booth” at the Toronto event for Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 Launch Event.  "Booth” is in quotes because this was not the typical trade-show kind of booth.  The event was set up as a celebration of software developers and all the wonderful things that t... [More]

Almost all companies have Microsoft SQL Server somewhere in their organization. It may have arrived there as part of a vendor application, Microsoft SharePoint deployment or custom web application. SQL Server does much more than just store data – at no additional cost! Other database tools often hav... [More]

Business Intelligence solutions can loosely be divided into two components: getting the data right (by cleaning it and storing in a Data Mart) and presenting the data to the user (through dashboards and reports). Preparing the data requires lots of time and effort and time to ensure the data is c... [More]

One of the great new features in Team Foundation Server 2010 is hierarchical queries.  A hierarchical query allows you to return multiples sets of related data in one query. The screen shot below shows a typical hierarchical query.  In this query I have selected “Work Items and Direct Lin... [More]

Can you install TFS 2010 RC over top of TFS 2010 Beta 2? No, setup detects that the Beta 2 is installed and aborts the install. However, you still get the RC version installed without too much effort.  In short, you have to: Backup your database Uninstall the Beta 2 version Instal... [More]

Now 10 days past, we still bask in the glow of the golden performances by Canadian Winter Olympians in Vancouver.  Even more importantly, as Canadians, we continue to thump our chests about stepping up on the world stage and demonstrating that we are proud of our country and our accomplishments... [More]

Management of resources is a high priority on people’s list. Organizations have a lot of focus on financial resources. Financial resources are usually easy to report on because they are captured in detail in financial systems. However, time is an equally if not more important resource for organizati... [More]