After a good 5 years posting and having my blog living under the Geekswithblogs umbrella, the time to move has arrived ...You will find me now at http://intentionalthinking.... rss feed on feedburner should be updated right after this post. All posts currently here will remain, this will be an archive to all previous content ......

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A little over a month ago I received a Nokia Lumia 2520. Have been using the device as a secondary tablet (given a Surface Pro 2 is the primary tablet), and I have been very happy with the results of my tests for it. I wish I could say I was typing this on it, but that I would venture to say it’s not too far into the future. Why not now? While I can ......

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The past couple of weeks have been packed with teasers and updates. But here they go. Visual Studio Update 3: http://www.microsoft.com/en... Visual Studio 2013 and TFS 2013 Preview: http://www.microsoft.com/vi... SQL Server 2014 CTP1 : http://technet.microsoft.co... ......

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From your Add-ons, select your instance: A couple of pieces of information to get here: 1) Your Connection info 2) General management details of your subscription with SuccessBricks To get your connection info, click on the Connection Info toolbar at the bottom of your Management Portal. That reveals the following to be able to use the connection string ......

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Recently I made the switch from having a local TFS deployment to using the hosted Team Foundation Service. As I had been using it back when it was TFSPreview, there were projects that had been left over, I no longer need those projects. Most of them were tests anyway. But reviewing in reviewing the portal I was not able to find anything to do it from ......

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In continuing with the post that I started last week, this week I focus on how I used PowerShell to install Hyper-V on Windows 8 and then create all necessary items to continue the creation of the SharePoint lab running on Hyper-V on Windows 8. First thing, in all situations I started PowerShell as Administrator. And yes, many of this items can be done ......

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I was invited to do a presentation on Business Intelligence and Self Service BI at an internal Summit for a Health organization in Indianapolis. Here is the slide deck ......

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In the last number of days, I have come across the release of the Microsoft Office Division Demo VMs. While a great asset, it is also quite large and it consumes a lot of resources, this being said as I have a Lenovo W530 with 32GB RAM, and 3 Hard Drives. The download is a 56GB set, then expanded it comes to 220GB. That is just the storage piece. Then ......

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It took close to 10hrs to provision, below are some screenshots of what is the generated content. More details and info to come… but for now, make sure you check the email you will receive from the system once the platform is fully provisioned (otherwise you will go crazy getting logged on) and you do not want to disrupt the process of getting the packs ......

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A couple of items to know and understand about this. One is the overall setup you will have completed, and then the other is the time it takes. Overall Setup Important to understand you will be working with a new trial tenant, you can’t use an existing one. Also, the tenant is an E3, that means $20 month/user if you decide to move from trial to permanent. ......

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I came across the following information on twitter today: “Microsoft has made available a demo environment for the Microsoft Office platform”. What is this, you may ask? Well it is a smorgasbord demo environment!! It includes Microsoft Office, Lync, Exchange, SharePoint, and all in the 2013 stack. You get two possible options, one is to create a demo ......

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You may have been working with Windows Azure for a while and likely you tested the IaaS beta/preview. Today, early today, was announced by Scott Guthrie the general availability of the Infrastructure as a Service piece. And with it prices, additional capabilities and new templates. Check the announcement here … http://weblogs.asp.net/scot... ......

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Next week I will be at MMS 2013 in Las Vegas! I will be presenting 5 sessions, one of which will be a repeat session. If you are going to be attending and you did not know about Exam Prep sessions, make sure to make a stop the Training and Certification area. Get your Certs updated or started, we will have MCTs presenting several Exam Prep sessions ......

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As I was installing the newly released tools, and catching up on updates for a new system, I ran into the following situation. When it came to going through the dialog screens to install the new tools, under Installation Type, it came down to two options. Perform a new installation of SQL Server 2012 was one, the other, Add features to an existing instance ......

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As versions of the server products have changed, and a more “modern” interface and cleaner display is about. Well, so are the Visio stencils we should be using when designing our infrastructure or enterprise diagrams. Below is a list of the new stencils available. SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and Office 2013 http://www.microsoft.com/en... ......

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