Long time no see, i’m trying hard to have some spare time to write, but it’s being hard…

Today I’ve an important notice,  since 2007 to Fev 2009 i was working in a Business Intelligence Project, last months i was in a Quality Assurance Project.

Next month , I’ll work in a Portuguese  big company as Project Architect for Enterprise Architecture projects.

So , this is the main topic after almost 4 and half years working at my company i resigned to become part of a wonderful project and join a new company.

I’ll also resign all my other projects.

I’m keen to start working with the Enterprise Architecture team and learn a lot new stuff.

cheers ,

This article focuses the ideia behind Microsoft Student Technology Experience .

You can read all the article at (in portuguese) http://www.mundouniversitario.pt/artigos.php?art=2874

In my humble opinion the concept behind this event is unique and i don’t remember any other event that explores the relation between students and the IT market.

Full Poster

http://i44.tinypic.com/30ikr4g.jpg

Today is about leadership, long time with any of this, but in our lives at some point always guide us to the path of some type of leadership related issue, and i’m going to focus certainly critical problem that we all must went through in some corporate events.

There are four models Leadership communicators

The Expert

The first type of leadership communicator is the expert, o

r the keeper of the mission. The expert holds to the organization’s mission—what the organization is and how it conducts business. Experts base their decision making on facts and their relationship to the business environment—how the company can anticipate and capitalize on market opportunities.

Colin Powell is an excellent example of the expert who understands the mission and what it takes to fulfill it. As one who was raised in the military as a soldier and then as a military aide to politicians, Powell knows his subject matter. When you listen to him speak, he presents his point of view as a matter of fact; in other words, he is abiding by the mission.

Corporate leaders, too, can be experts. They also keep close tabs on their human resources, always evaluating whether they have the right people doing the jobs and what they need to do to develop the next generation of leaders.

The Visionary

The second type of leadership communicator is what we call the visionary. Visionaries are those leaders whose ardent belief in their cause outweighs their words. Their speaking style comes from deep within, from their inner core values. Their mission is to persuade, to change points of view. And their leadership does not stop when the words do. Rather, it continues in the conduct of their daily lives.

One of the most impassioned leadership speakers of our times is Steve Jobs. A pioneer in the development of the personal computer, Jobs is a highly vocal advocate for the integration of technology into one’s lifestyle. An accomplished speaker, Jobs knows how to involve the audience, how to tell a story, how to use language to draw mental pictures, and, most convincingly, how to use his passion to persuade others of the inevitability of his cause.

Jobs mixes the language of technology with a gee-whiz fascination with the possibilities of what digitally based personalized technologies can deliver. His experience in Hollywood as a founder of Pixar, an animation house, coupled with his iconic stature as the co-founder of Apple Computer, lends Jobs a stature that few in his industry can match. Another secret to Jobs’s ability to sell his message is his willingness to intertwine his personal destiny with that of Apple. Thus, his message becomes larger than life and has more of an opportunity of being heard, not simply by dedicated users of Apple computers, but also by the mainstream media.

In our context, the visionary has a passion that supercedes spoken words. The message itself is always in what the speaker says—as it is with the expert—but what gives it power is the leader’s conviction concerning the cause. The visionary as a leader-presenter is consumed with passion. He or she believes in the cause and wants others to embrace it.

The Coach

The third type of leadership communicator is a combination of the previous two—part visionary and part expert. We call this type of leader the coach. The coach is a collaborator, the one who is called upon by virtue of her or his expertise in a particular subject. Coaches are those who change organizations one person at a time. They look for the unique way to communicate to an individual by discovering what motivates that person, e.g., more money, advancement, or prestige. Once the coach learns the motivational point, he or she can leverage it to help the person succeed.

More and more management, and by extension leadership, involves coaching. Why? Leaders are evaluated on the results of their people. It is up to the leader to enable the team to succeed. Success depends upon communication, as the leader must determine what people need and how the leader can deliver it.

Leader-coaches must adjust their focus throughout the day to address the needs of individuals as well as the needs of the team. The model of the successful sports coach is an apt example. Vince Lombardi was a coach who was able to communicate to players one at a time; his players say that he got them to play better because he raised their expectations of themselves. In other words, he elevated their own perceptions of their abilities and in so doing enabled them to play better.

The Transformer

The fourth type of leadership communicator is again one part visionary, another part expert, but this individual leans toward the visionary. He or she is the transformer: The mission is to persuade—to change minds. Transformers also are one part visionary. They know where they want to take their people, and they apply their selling skills to convince people to come along with them. The transformer as a leader-presenter is one who has both the information and the conviction to persuade the listener to her or his point of view.

Think of a successful salesperson. Think of the words that come to mind when you think of such an individual: knowledgeable, personable, willing to take questions, patient, and persistent. All of these are qualities that salespeople—and presenters who want to persuade others—need to have in abundance.

A good example of a transformer is Mother Teresa. As a sister working in the slums of Calcutta, she brought food, rudimentary medical assistance, and hope to the street people. Realizing strength in numbers, she founded a missionary order to carry out her good intentions. Their continual presence in Calcutta reminds the rest of the world of its obligation to those less fortunate. As word of her work spread throughout the world, she became a willing participant in “selling the mission” to those who could be of assistance. She badgered popes, princes, presidents, and celebrities, all in the name of her mission. She communicated her zeal for her mission through her writing and her public appearances. Her example reminds us of what it takes to make a difference.

Keep in mind that your leadership communication style may vary from situation to situation. One day you may need to be the expert, adhering to the organizational mission. Other times, you may act as the coach, willing to advise, but careful to let the audience make up its own mind. And still other times, you may be communicating in all four modes, depending upon the situation.

PerformancePoint

Kurt DelBene, Senior Vice President of the Microsoft Office Business Platform Group.

Says that PerformancePoint Server 2007 will be merged into Sharepoint Server Enterprise , and will renamed PerformancePoint Services.

Benefits PerformancePoint Services helps users:

• Align government activity across the enterprise Organizations benefit when strategy and accountability can be driven across all departments: citizen services, finance, HR, public safety, engineering, IT, and other groups can all benefit from easy-to-use scorecarding.

• Gain deep contextual insight PerformancePoint Services includes rich drill-down capabilities, personalized scorecards, reports, and analysis tools to combine structured information with unstructured data. Users gain deeper insight, which can help them make better and faster decisions.

• Enhance the partnership with IT IT staffs spend a lot of time providing departmental users with information. Because PerformancePoint Services gives these users the functionality to quickly set up their own performance dashboards and scorecards, IT is freed for more critical functions such as meeting security and compliance requirements.

• Built on the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform PerformancePoint Services takes advantage of the enterprise-level reliability and security, high performance, and scalability of the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence platform. PerformancePoint Services also makes broad adoption possible by providing robust analytic insights through the familiar and easy-to-use Microsoft Office system environment.

More Information at

http://www.microsoft.com/business/performancepoint/

Read the Press Release

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/jan09/01-27KurtDelbeneQA.mspx

Este evento irá ocorrer na data de

terça-feira, 24 de Março de 2009 9:00 – terça-feira, 24 de Março de 2009 16:30 GMT, Londres

This post its a little bit late, but i think it  worth your attention,

My hard working days don’t let me share my humble knowledge with my fine readers, but today i going to summarize what i watched  at the event DevDays 2009 held at Lisbon, Portugal.

So the main topics were:

• Visual Studio 2008 – Test Driven Development – unit, example- http://www.geekzone.co.nz/vs2008/6187
• ASP.net MVC , Dynamic Data – http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet
• Visual Studio 2010 – Functional Tests, Automatization
• Windows Azure – Cloud architecture and development
• Architecture- Patterns and Anti-patterns
  
• Architecture- Event Driven
• Architecture- SOA Vs Event Driven
• VS Scrum e Team System
• Mock Objects, Dependency Injection in unit tests development .
• Software Architecture/ Enterprise / Solutions/ Strategic

This is some of the information i recommend you to search for.

GRAB THE KNOWLEDGE

Some people say that Cloud computing part of web 2.0, but in my humble opinion Cloud is far from full throttle and still more to come, but in nowadays,  prevails what we got.

What is The Cloud ?

A set of connected Computers , but to understand really what cloud is we must understand the types of cloud computing

• Utility Computing:  providing virtual machine instances, storage, and computation at pay-as-you-go utility pricing was the breakthrough in this category, and now everyone wants to play. Developers, not end-users, are the target of this kind of cloud computing. Example of this http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

• Software/Platform as a Service : Software Services available to end users without deploying instances on local costumer machines, the servers stays on the cloud.  Example Salesforce
  

• Cloud Based end user applications : Facebook, Google Apps, twitter, the principle behind this is  services and services in the cloud behind an web app . Example: When we use the google apps , there numerous services and services connected behind but we use that computing power to use the app without download it to our local pc.

The Azure Services Platform

Azure Services Platform

What does Windows Azure Provide ?

• The Same Facilities that an Desktop SO provide but on a set of connected computers
• Shared File System
• Resource Allocation
• Programming Environments

Features ?

• Automated Service Management
• Powerful service Hosting environment
• Scalable available cloud storage

Developers Features ?

• A simulated Cloud environment on the desktop
• Support other programming languages :  PHP
• Integration with Eclipse
• MSDN Community

You can search more about this topic, in my humble opinion Windows Azure is  going to be a top-notch solution.

By the way – to a notice to Portuguese Readers :

Windows Azure is going to be introduced at DevDays 2009 Tech sessions

http://www.devdays09.com/

ARC201 – Introduction to Windows Azure and the Azure Service Platform (part 1)

Windows Azure and the Azure Service Platform are key parts of Microsoft’s cloud computing initiative. Learn what it takes to write services which run on Windows Azure and get an introduction to the Azure services such as SQL Services and .NET Services. We will discuss how to create or extend applications and services to take advantage of this new platform.

And other sessions about azure, check the agenda.

2009 is coming and I’m going to share with you two whole new categories:

- Sofware Quality Management: Coordinated activities to direct and control an organization with regard to quality. Direction and control with regard to quality generally includes the establishment of the quality policy and quality objectives, quality planning, quality control, quality
assurance and quality improvement.

- Software Testing ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_testing

I hope you all like what is coming

The guidelines to this work are well defined by International Software Testing Qualifications Board , and this “buddies” are going to help me to share with you some information that i personally like and hope to provide you the state of the art standards.

Stay Tuned, new topics will arrive.

Today is a technology post, (by the grace of god), i always try to alternate between leadership and technology post,

This post is divided into two “Brother” issues, first issue is about the  BI Project life cycle , i prefer you to try to understand the diagram than explain all components of “Kimball Architecture”

BI Project Lifecycle Diagram

Next Component is about the Stages of a BI Project development Architecture.

BI Development Architecture