Microsoft Atlanta Begins….

  • Article

image

There is an incredible level of satisfaction in being able to turn an idea into something real. Something valuable. Years go at Microsoft I talked to my colleagues about a vision where we could provide our knowledge in CSS using online technologies instead of having customers struggle to find KB articles on the web. Provide a service that would give customers specific advice based on their installation. That vision has now become a reality in the form of Microsoft Codename “Atlanta”. Partnering with the System Center product team, engineers in our SQL CSS team have been able to provide our knowledge in the form of alerts (or rules) as advice for what you should check on your SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2 installation. This advice is based on common issues we encounter when working with customers on our support cases. I’ve been working on the Atlanta project for some time (which is why my blogging rate has gone down) but of course could not talk about until now.

Over the next month I’ll be posting various blogs on this site about how Atlanta works, what kind of alerts and advice we are providing, why it may be important for you, and where we are heading in the future for this project.

But for now I’ll let you look at some resources to help you get started:

1) Watch a video from this week’s PASS Summit keynote on Tuesday. Ted Kummert, Senior VP, Business Platform Division at Microsoft, asked me to give a brief demo of Atlanta during the keynote. To view the entire recording of the keynote including this demo, use this link for on-demand viewing:

https://www.sqlpass.org/summit/na2010/LiveKeynotes/Tuesday.aspx

2) Try out the beta. How?

Just go to https://www.microsoftatlanta.com. Sign-up using a Windows Live ID (you can create one from this site), run the very simple setup program, and start looking at what advice Atlanta provides you about your SQL Server installation using the same web site.

Turning ideas and visions into a real product is only half the story. Someone has to actually like it and want to use it. So I decided to search on twitter to see what folks were saying after we launched on Tuesday. The results I’m happy to say are mostly very positive (look towards the end of these tweets for comments at the conference).

https://twitter.com/#!/search/Microsoft%20atlanta

Here is also blog post from one of our customers who has installed Atlanta and done an early review

https://sqlblog.com/blogs/john_paul_cook/archive/2010/11/10/microsoft-atlanta-first-look.aspx

We have all kinds of knowledge in support we wish our customers could find easily. Atlanta is a game changer for us (and hopefully you) because we now have that online connection to provide our knowledge, update it regularly, and target it to each customer’s configuration and installation.

Bob Ward
Microsoft