Had another great day of training on Thursday at the PASS Summit.  After the fantastic keynote by David DeWitt, I went to a breakout session by Joe Webb on Data Driven Subscriptions in Reporting Services.  We already use Data Driven Subscriptions in my company, but I figured I could always learn something new, and besides, Joe is a good presenter.  Unfortunately I could not stay through the whole session because I had to leave early to get ready for the Meet the Chapters event at the lunch.  I was hosting the table for the Professional Development Virtual Chapter that we...

Thursday was the last day of the main conference this year, and it was kicked off in fine fashion by Bill Graziano who promised to have the fastest keynote at the conference.  Part of Bill’s talk involved a moment of recognition for Kevin Kline, for the amazing amounts of work he did over 10 years of being on the PASS Board of Directors.  Over the seven Summit conferences that I have attended, I have never seen the PASS crowd give a standing ovation to anybody, but they did this year, and it was well deserved.  Thanks, Kevin, for all you...

The Summit on Wednesday kicked off with Rushabh Mehta, new PASS President, making some opening remarks and then handing-off to Ted Casey from Microsoft for the keynote.  The things that stuck in my mind from Tom’s talk were some whiz-bang demos of PowerPivot with Excel 2010 and SharePoint 2010.  There was a demo where they were manipulating 100 million rows in Excel and made an off-hand remark about Excel 2010 including a mini OLAP engine in it to handle this.  And there was something about Reporting Services Data Sources can be exported as a Data Feed which can be consumed...

There are 160 breakout sessions this year at the PASS Community Summit in Seattle, with 14 different sessions going on in any given time slot.  This means that there is a really good chance that you will find something of interest to attend during every session time slot.  This also means that there is a good chance that there will be more than one thing that you want to attend at a time.  And since I still haven’t found that cloning lab that Graz was talking about, I’m glad that most of these sessions are being recorded and will be...

Last night at the Exhibitor Reception at the Summit, Lance Harra said to me, “I thought you gave up on Twitter.”  That was in response to seeing my Twitter ID on my name badge.  Some of you may recall that last year, just before the PASS conference, I jumped on the Twitter bandwagon to play with it during the event.  Shortly thereafter, I jumped back off.  Well, this year, again shortly before the Summit, I started getting interested again.  So, here are a few things I thought I’d share to clear the air… I learned a few tricks to...

KUDOS to Wayne Snyder! If you have read my reviews of past PASS Community Summit events, you probably know that it is a bit of a pet peeve of mine when speakers run over their scheduled time.  Taking a more positive approach this year, I’d like to commend PASS President Wayne Snyder for realizing he was running out of time during his opening remarks before the Microsoft Keynote, and cutting his talk short, skipping over a couple of his last slides.  I’m sure that the valuable information he had on those slides will be presented to the membership at...

This year the schedule for the PASS Community Summit was shifted by one day to change from having two days of pre-conference seminars and then the main conference on Wednesday through Friday; to having one day of pre-conference seminars, one day of post-conference seminars, and the main conference on Tuesday through Thursday.  It will be interesting to see what sort of feedback this new schedule generates.  As for me, it works fine either way. The pre- and post-conference seminars are typically all-day seminars that cover a topic in significant depth.  These seminars cost extra beyond the money for the main conference...