Travis Nielsen

I work with ISA 2006 on a on and off basis. Its one of those products we don’t necessarily focus on, but we often run into cases where customers need additional security and authentication functionality beyond that which can be (easily) provided in their applications. More often than not, we find that ISA 2006 turns […]

If you missed the recent story in the New York Times about the compromise of over 1,000 computers affiliated with the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama (OHHDL), read it. Or better yet, read the report published by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. I promise you it will be one of the best […]

And I mean much faster. A few weeks ago, I posted about plotting all 48 continental U.S. states onto a Virtual Earth map. Due to some unfortunate performance issues with rendering complex shapes using the VE map control IE 7, it was necessary for me to simplify them using one of the new SQL 2008 […]

Meet Alice and Bob. Co-workers in a typical office so commonly found in Midwest North America. It has K-Cup coffee, central air conditioning, and maybe even some awards hanging on some walls that were won from another, much larger company. The paint color is conservative. The Girl Scout cookies are in abundance. Alice is nervous […]

There’s a ton of material out there on the web by people who are plotting things like push-pins to Virtual Earth maps. But what has always interested me, and has always been somewhat of a struggle, is doing the same for complex polygons like U.S. States and counties. In fact, to date I haven’t run […]

Over the past six months, I’ve been experimenting a lot with the Virtual Earth Map Control. I must say that I’ve been really impressed with the great community out there contributing guidance and code examples to help folks learn what this stuff is all about. There is a tangible level of excitement for this kind […]

Over the weekend, I experienced some frustration installing the SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Technologies. The last time I tried this for SQL 2005, I ran into problems caused by that fact that I use Windows 2008 Server (as a workstation) and have User Account Control enabled. This time, the issue was […]

Often we here on the BI team at PointBridge need to document existing Analysis Services implementations. This can be somewhat time consuming, so we developed a quick PowerShell script that uses Analysis Management Objects (AMO) to iterate through all existing AS databases on a particular server an return some metrics to tab-delimited output. ## Add […]

Creative title. I know. A few weeks ago, I ran into a frustrating issue with installing the Reporting Services Add-In for SharePoint. Basically the install package would get through most of the process and roll-back at the very end. The application event log would record the following: Log Name: ApplicationSource: MsiInstallerDate: 8/5/2008 12:16:16 PMEvent ID: […]

We recently had a customer that was looking to do some pretty sophisticated URL and link translation and wanted to know it if could be done with ISA 2006. Here were the requirements: Inbound URL: http://www.abc.fr/directoryA/somepage.aspx Internal URL: http://www.abc.local/directoryB/somepage.aspx Returned to user in browser address line: http://www.abc.fr/directoryA/somepage.aspx Inbound URL: http://www.abc.jp/directoryC/somepage.aspx Internal URL: http://www.abc.local/directoryD/somepage.aspx Returned to […]

I’m pleased to announce my third PointCast in the Windows 2008 Server series. It covers Rights Management Services and provides a demonstration of its integration with SharePoint Portal Server 2007. I’m a big fan of RMS and I encourage anyone who needs persistent document protection to take a close look at it. There is a […]

When you install Certificate Services on Windows 2003 and Windows 2008, you have the option to add Web Enrollment Pages. These pages are needed if you need a higher level of assurance for your certificates than Auto Enrollment provides. In other words, they facilitate a process by which: A user submits a request for a […]