you may (or may not) have noticed a week long drought of WoD posts, and while some will probably just assume that i’ve just gotten lazy and stopped posting or worse yet, that i’ve stopped working out completely – or maybe that my times/results/weights/reps/etc. have been so embarrassing that i refuse to post them on my site… well, that’s not the case.
last sunday i went down to San Antonio, TX for the spring NiUG (National iMIS User Group) conference. iMIS is the program that we use at Pheasants Forever for our customer records. i went to the same conference last year in Orlando, FL – and i knew VERY little about the application. this year, i had a better grip on the program as i’ve been an instrumental figure in the development of our setup and have become the resident expert in all things iMIS at PF. having this experience in iMIS and going to an iMIS conference really was beneficial – as i was able to ask more specific questions; questions that answered an issue we were having at PF. it was kind of nice not being completely overwhelmed with total newness.
the first day was spent working on SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services), which i think i am going to be quite fond of once i delve more into that realm. it was a good class and i think this will benefit MANY of the departments at PF. it was a rough start, because i didn’t have everything setup locally on the laptop that i brought down to do all the work and i continued to work on getting the laptop setup completely during ‘down’ periods throughout the week (finally getting it COMPLETELY setup sometime on wednesday afternoon). i was running into a handful of problems because i was running windows 7 operating system, running iis 7.5 and SQL Server 2005 (i do have SQL Server 2008 installed on this machine as well). through this process, i found out that iis 7.5 and SQL Server 2005 have some compatibility issues and i did a lot of installing/uninstalling/reinstalling of different components until i finally got it all configured correctly. then, i searched and searched on how to install Visual Studio 2005… not a lot of help there… for those looking, it’s a part of the SQL Server 2005 installation – relatively well hidden under the advanced settings > Client Components > Business Intelligence Development Tools (durh, of course </sarcasm>). and of course there are compatibility issues with SQL Server 2005 and windows 7, so update after update was installed…
moral of the story, i’m very good at installing SQL Server 2005 and 2008, including Visual Studio, getting SSRS running on a SQL 2005 server and windows 7. it’s just a pain in the @$$.
so the conference was a blast, met some more great and wonderful (and mature) people. networked like a mad man and got some ideas for making things at PF more efficient – hopefully, people listen to me more 🙂
i’ve been to two of these conferences and both times i’ve learned so much it’s unreal. the hardest part is retaining all that i learn. we can only hope that i’m able to continue going to these conferences and become even more valuable and helpful to PF.