BCM and Sql, in general

BCM uses Sql Server to manage its data. BCM asks Sql Server client software to connect it to its data using a string to identify the server and database. Sql manages everything else. Sql Server is a Windows NT service running on the same or another machine. BCM does not directly access the file where the database stores its data, Sql does that itself, although BCM does ask Sql to put the file in a folder owned by the user.

BCM does surface some database management features in its UI--e.g., asking Sql to create a new database, select another database, and backup or restore the database--but BCM doesn't have UI for every feature of Sql Server, like changing the physical location of the database file or moving it to another server.

To do any database operations that aren't in the BCM UI you need to use Sql Server directly.

Lacan’s three psychoanalytic orders in software development

It occurred to me while watching a Zizek lecture [starting around minute ten] that the symbolic-real-imaginary triad of Jacques Lacan’s three psychoanalytic orders mapped directly to the three different disciplines--program management/marketing, development, and testing--used in companies developing software. The first imagines what product consumers need, how to sell it to them, and comes up with the specification of a desired "imaginary real" product. This gets passed on to the developers who must convert the specification into symbols understood by the computing machinary. They produce the "symbolic real" programming code, which the machine transforms into binary code. The resulting binary program, such as it is, is passed on to the testers who must then ascertain that it actually works, the "real real".

If that is taken as such, then product pathologies (bad software) could be understood as impedences and dissonances between the different realities. And resolving them is somewhat akin to psychoanalysis.

How to use OR in BCM filters

Filters with multiple fields AND the fields, and the user interface does not have an option to use OR instead. You can however get at the text of the command that runs the filter and edit it, replacing AND with OR.

Details here.

BCM and web search

Woke up today to the news that the number three web search company offered to buy number two.

I tried a couple searches to see how the search engines rate today.

If I search from "Outlook BCM", Yahoo's first link is to the Outlook page on the Office web sites, Google's first link is to instructions for Outlook Web access at the Baylor College of Medicine and number two to the BCM page on the Office web sites, and on Live Search the first link is to a Google page for the BCM newsgroup and there are no links to BCM product pages--but there is an ad for Avidian.

Searching for "BCM blog", this blog shows up a couple pages down on Google, but not on Yahoo or Live Search when I gave up paging through their results.

Helping Microsoft customers find the information they need; another reason Google owns the search market.

Outlook rates BCM's welcome message as spam

This is pretty entertaining, although it doesn't happen on my machine and I'm surprised something a message rated as spam didn't get moved to the Junk E-mail folder.