Let The Morning Come - CD/DVD project RELEASED

This is a really exciting bit of news:  my church's 2nd CD recording project, and 1st DVD, is finally complete and available!!!

We have a rather large pool of musicians and creative artists at my church (www.121cc.com), so last Fall, we all got together for 3 days and wrote and collaborated on music.  Then we planned a 2-evening event, which we called "Let The Morning Come" where we recorded music and video of the performances.

I was able to participate in 7 songs on the CD, and after having listened to the final mastered versions, this week...THEY SOUND GREAT!  Hats off to all of the folks that were involved, especially David Parker and Chris Clayton (www.chrisclayton.com), who headed up this effort.

We have a MySpace page for the Worship and Creative Arts team, which has a few sample tracks from the album (www.myspace.com/121ccworship).

Also, you can view a trailer/preview of the DVD on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP9O1FwpCGI)

Hope you and enjoy - and check out the iTunes Music Store soon if you would like to purchase a copy of your own

So long PPS Planning - Long Live SharePoint

 

This week, in the news, Microsoft made some pretty big announcements.  Besides all the planned layoffs (~5000 jobs will be cut from R&D, IT, Marketing, Sales, Finance, and more), the big one came in the BI arena with regards to PerformancePoint Server and their BI strategy for the future.

After nearly 2 very slow years of adoption, Microsoft has decided to stop development and discontinue the Planning package, originally a part of PerformancePoint Server.  Microsoft also plans on rolling the Monitoring and Analytics piece of PPS into SharePoint Server, their enterprise content management and portal software.  This move will also rebrand the PPS offering to PerformancePoint Services.  Previous ProClarity and Business Scorecard Manager products, which have been integrated into PPS, will no longer be available for purchase as Microsoft puts all of their eggs in the one Microsoft Office basket.

By mid 2009, we should see the final cumulative updates to the current PPS offering, and from then on we'll just need to re-shift our focus.  After April 2009, customers and partners will no longer be able to purchase PPS, and will need to get a ECAL of SharePoint Server with Software Assurance, in order to obtain any additional licenses for PPS (even for current deployments).

Part of this decision stems from the fact that Microsoft is putting a lot of effort and investments in the next version of SQL Server in 2010 (aka. "Gemini").

You can read more about this topic, including their press release at the following links:

Office MS BI Blog: Microsoft BI Strategy Update

Just Call Me Office 14 SharePoint PerformancePoint Services

Microsoft BI Announcement Q&A