Whitepapers

Select a Whitepaper below:

Enabling Business Intelligence for Everyone

From boardroom executives to frontline operation managers, the uncertain economy has highlighted the necessity—and the benefits—of making informed decisions. Microsoft delivers a complete Business Intelligence (BI) suite with the familiar productivity tools in Microsoft® Office 2010 and the collaboration and search technologies in Microsoft® SharePoint Server® 2010. This white paper explains how Microsoft Business Intelligence allows your employees to gain deep business insights while working in familiar environments, and then easily share these insights across the organization.

Enabling Business Intelligence for Everyone

Streamlining the Development Process with Visual Studio 2010

Many organizations fall into the trap of optimizing a part of their development process while failing to look at the end-to-end development process.  Although this low-hanging fruit approach can sometimes result in positive change, it very often misses the big gains that can be made when focusing on the entire end-to-end process. Learn how Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 provide deep visibility across the entire end-to-end process to create real change that impacts an entire organization instead of just a single team.

Streamlining the Development Process with Visual Studio 2010

Building Quality Applications with Visual Studio 2010

Quality considerations are of paramount importance in the software business. It has long been understood that the costs of defects rise significantly when they are not caught early. The agile community sees continuous integration and testing as fundamental practices. This whitepaper explains how Visual Studio 2010 provides an aggressive set of innovations around test and quality to help software teams deliver superior results.

Building Quality Applications with Visual Studio 2010

Understanding Your Systems with Visual Studio 2010

Most projects start from an existing code base – whether you are enhancing an existing application or re-writing an application to modernize it. In either case, the documentation for the existing system is most likely non-existent, stale, or simply wrong. The people who wrote the system are no longer available to the new team, which is left trying to understand a system with no starting point. This whitepaper explains how Visual Studio 2010 gives you that starting point and allows teams to be productive in a fraction of the time it takes today.

Understanding Your Systems with Visual Studio 2010

What is Application Lifecycle Management?

David Chappel explains how application lifecycle management (ALM) needs to includes the entire time during which an organization is spending money on the application, from the initial idea to the end of the application’s life. ALM can be divided into three distinct areas – governance, development, and operations – and maximizing the value of the application means managing all three areas well.

What is Application Lifecycle Management?

Application Lifecycle Management and Business Strategy

Learn about the connection between business strategy and application lifecycle management (ALM). Business strategy often means being different from the competition, which often requires the development of custom software. Because of this, getting good at ALM is an essential part of creating competitive advantage.

Application Lifecycle Management and Business Strategy

Application Lifecycle Management as a Business Process

Most business people understand the strategic value of differentiated business processes. Yet the importance of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) in supporting those processes gets much less attention. Learn how any organization that creates custom software should take the ALM process as seriously as it does any other critical business process.

Application Lifecycle Management as a Business Process

Tools for Team Development: Why Vendors Are Finally Getting It Right

These days, most software development is done by teams of people. Yet even though tools to support team-based development have been available for some time, they weren’t always as useful as they might have been. Today, the vendors who create those tools have reached a consensus on what the real problem is, and they’re providing tools to solve it. Learn about team development tools that focus on the right thing: optimizing the end-to-end development process.

Tools for Team Development: Why Vendors Are Finally Getting It Right

Heterogeneous Development with Visual Studio 2010

Many organizations develop and support applications written in Java, .NET, and other platforms. Today, these disparate platforms have resulted in separate silos, leaving the organization without end-to-end visibility into its development efforts.  This separation also means that any process improvements made by one silo are unlikely to benefit the other silos.  Find out how Visual Studio 2010 will make that painful separation a thing of the past.

Heterogeneous Development with Visual Studio 2010

Becoming More Effective and Efficient at Testing with Visual Studio Test Professional 2010

There are two key goals for any Quality Assurance and Test Professional: to validate the quality of an application and to improve overall software quality. Yet testing effort is often wasted on necessary repetition, unclear test prioritization, and downright human error. Learn how to use Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 to achieve these two goals efficiently and effectively using the right testing and diagnostics tools to create superior solutions and interactions.

Becoming More Effective and Efficient at Testing with Visual Studio Test Professional 2010

Eliminate Bugs with Visual Studio 2010

An enormous amount of time is spent debugging problems in code – even simple problems take time. The new debugging tools in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate give developers a successful outcome to any debugging session. But more than that, developers can do it in a fraction of the time previously required. Find out how elusive non-reproducible and intermittent errors can be eliminated quickly, saving time and money and increasing customer satisfaction.

Eliminate Bugs with Visual Studio 2010

Enabling Performance & Stress Test throughout the Application Lifecycle

Poor application performance costs companies millions of dollars and their reputation every year. The simple challenge of releasing software that behaves predictably, consistently and responsively continues to be a big one. Internal applications with poor performance add another layer of cost - both in lost productivity and missed deadlines. This whitepaper describes how Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 provides the tools to measure, improve and verify application performance under the most demanding conditions so that your application performs predictably regardless of the situation.

Enabling Performance & Stress Test throughout the Application Lifecycle

Introduction to New Data Warehouse Scalability Features in SQL Server 2008

With the 2008 release, SQL Server makes a major advance in scalability for data warehousing. It meets the data warehouse needs of the largest enterprises more easily than ever. SQL Server 2008 provides a range of integrated products that enable you to build your data warehouse, and query and analyze its data. This whitepaper introduces the new performance and manageability features for data warehousing across all these components, showing how all these features contribute to improved scalability.

Introduction to New Data Warehouse Scalability Features in SQL Server 2008

Using SQL Server to Build a Hub-and-Spoke Enterprise Data Warehouse Architecture

Scalable, cost-effective Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) implementation is an elusive goal for many large organizations. Three common approaches include centralized EDW – the “monolithic” approach, decentralized collections of data marts, and attempts at hub-and-spoke architectures that combine the previous two. This whitepaper describes Microsoft’s unique and compelling Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) data warehouse solution that combines the best features of both EDW and decentralized data marts, providing the basis for solving one of the most intractable problems in large-scale data warehousing.

Using SQL Server to Build a Hub-and-Spoke Enterprise Data Warehouse Architecture
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