The Neat Works SP1 (version 4.1.1) available for download on your website offers support for 64 bit operating systems. However it refuses to install unless Neat Works 4.0.7.256 or 4.0.8.136 is already installed.

I decided to stick around in Taos another day and go riding with some of my friends. We decided to do a figure 8 loop that included the Rio Grande river and the Taos Ski Valley Resort. Just outside Taos is a steep gorge carved by the Rio Grande with an impressive bridge.

Here you see the canyon looking North, straight down, and South. Very impressive.

We decided to ride and find breakfast on the way. As we went through a small town we noticed all the locals appeared to be eating at the Cowboy Kitchen. The food was good, but not spectacular like some of the places in Taos. Blue Corn Huevos Rancheros and eggs with  chile sauce and cheese enchilada were quite good.

The Taos Ski Valley Resort was a pleasant stop. The slopes looked very steep.

Someone had recommended Tim's Stray Dog Cantina to us for lunch. We sat on the deck and enjoyed the rushing noise from the creek and enjoyed some very yummy food with excellent chile's. The cook came out at one point and gave us a quick lesson on where to get the best chile peppers and how to roast them to perfection. If you are looking for a business opportunity it's for sale.

We finished the top loop of the figure 8 after lunch and returned to Taos. We had dinner at the Apple Tree which was just a short walk from the hotel. The chicken and mango enchiladas were very good. The ambience was nice as well. A central courtyard was full of comfortable tables with booths around the edges. A tip for the service staff; if you have a table that includes men and women and you decide to card one of the men you must also card the women. You should say something like: "He was a little borderline, but you young lady, I really must check your id."

Bikes, Bikes and more bikes. Today is the last day of the event and I wandered around checking out all the bikes looking for cool farkles (an upgrade or customization - for all my non motorcycle friends). I hear we had 208 people and 162 motorcycles. A very good showing. Many folks were cleaning and polishing for the traditional show and shine. One ST was disassembled for some kind of maintenance/upgrade.

In the category of information overload I found a few setups that make the space shuttle look easy to pilot.

Of course not every upgrade has to involve microchips and auxiliary antennas. This simple horn modification was a sight to behold. You never know when you might need to sound like a bicycle.

I also like the hide away highway pegs. As they say on Sesame Street - Open....Closed.

These auxiliary tip over bars were interesting. I might need some of those if/when I get an ST1300. On the other hand my track record has been pretty good. my ST1100 had 58K miles on it before it ever hit the pavement - and I had to have a car bash into me to make that happen.

This is a very international event and as you can see we had a number of proud Canadians who were happy to show their patriotism with these flag stickers and a their unique sense of style with this back woods fur seat cover. I think Sesame Street should do more to enhance international relations, perhaps a new character: Bruce the Barbarian.

For my friends in Europe who know the ST as the Pan European (Honda marketing could compete with HP - Want some cold dead fish?) you should be reassured that several of the ST's had been rebadged to align with Honda Europe. Here is a fine red example.

The black ST here is a perfect example of unanticipated utility of the motorcycle. This pilot shall be known henceforth as "Sir Green Slayer" for his exemplary job of insect control using the non toxic and environmentally friendly technique of smashing as many insects as possible with his ST.

And as a final runner up in the fitment for violence category I saw this strange ring mount around the gas cap on this silver ST. I assume that this is for mounting some kind of heavy weapon. Perhaps an anti-car missile system for heavy traffic or a flamethrower/bbq option that uses the gasoline in the tank as a fuel source for dealing with venison close encounters. I must have missed that accessory in the Honda catalog - perhaps it is only in the police/military versions.

In the ouch that hurts category I found this blue ST1300 that had experienced some kind of impact trauma. The damage from the front was quite slight, but from the pilot's viewpoint the fractures were certainly more in evidence. Again borrowing from Sesame Street - Front....Back.

Proper hydration - especially in this hot weather - is very important for rider safety and comfort. These supertanker sized ultra slim cup holder options. Once more from Sesame Street - Empty....Full.

I don't know either. I am afraid to ask.

And finally a few pictures for my friends. John O. is off pursuing his passion for the outdoors and small boats and couldn't make it this year. John this ST is for you:

For my buddy Bill S. who I hope is having as much fun on his vacation as I am:

Yummy, yummy, yummy. I had breakfast with the Kelley's at Doc Martin's. Blue Corn pancakes with blueberries. They were fantastic. Highly recommended.

Favorite quote today "So you are telling me your bike doesn't run because of the orange juice in the pistons?" Linda Lambert was trying to explain why she couldn't check a particular e-mail account. Steve and I were both confused by her reasoning as it didn't make any sense. The orange juice was my analogy for you aren't making sense. I helped her with the Comcast account management interface and soon she was able to check her e-mail and the orange juice was no longer in the pistons.

Quiet day, cruised down to Albuquerque just to look around. Hot at 95 degrees. Got back around 6:30 pm and had a nice visit with friends over wine and cheese. I didn't get to Angel Fire for dinner. No pictures either.

It was a day for Rain and Road Work. This is the rainy season and today I got hailed on pretty hard as I approached New Mexico. Even through the 'stitch it felt like getting hit with marbles - or maybe paint balls as the hail stones were slushy after they hit. The hail cleaned the bugs off the windshield though!

I had a run in with an ignorant flagger at some road work in Colorado. In my experience it is customary for motorcycles to go to the head of the line when traffic is stopped for construction. The rationale is about safety. The opportunity to have a clear field of vision, set the pace and not have to worry about vehicles in front of you throwing up road debris are all important safety factors. It is not about getting ahead in traffic - motorcycles generally have no trouble doing that in general.

So as I approached a stop with two pickups towing large camp trailers already in line I swung out to pass. The flagger shouted at me (unintelligible through the helmet, earplugs and over the music playing in my helmet) and waved at me. I thought he wanted me to go to the inside to get to the head of the line. Since this was a downhill grade it would have been impossible to back up if I hadn't been on the Wing. I used the reverse feature to backup and then went to the front on the inside of the lane. Going down the inside is a bit tricky as the guardrail and pavement edge can be a safety issue as well. I should have just kept on my original course.

When I reached the head of the line the flagger came over to admonish me for my behavior. I killed the music and got the gist of what he was saying - essentially who did I think I was cutting to the front and why didn't I listen to him when he told me to get back in line. I calmly explained the safety issue and he told me I was lying since he had been doing this for three whole days and no other motorcycles had done this. I bit my tongue and let him run down. No point in telling him that just because he was ignorant and no other motorcycles cared for the safety aspects of navigating the construction zone didn't mean I was a liar. He wandered off after a bit and I waited for the construction vehicles to clear so we go proceed.

Other than the brief hail storm I didn't get rained on. There were lots of rain showers around but each time it appeared that I was headed right for the heart of the storm my path took a turn and I skirted around the storm.

Everyone always assumes the south west is intolerably hot this time of year. Most of it is, but southern Colorado and New Mexico can be quite nice in spots. Taos was a very pleasant 72 degrees yesterday. Here is a shot of my friend Steve Kelley is giving us part of the rider orientation.

WeSTOC was held here in 1998 as well. The hotel is the Best Western Kuchina Lodge. The service in the restaurant left much to be desired then and things have not improved. At dinner it took everyone quite a long time to get served. This is a shot of the apple pie my friend Bill Pratt ordered. We all cracked up it was so pathetic. Bill wandered over to tell Adam Koczarski (one of the chief  disorganizer for WeSTOC XII in Redmond, WA) and company that they should think twice about ordering dessert as the apple pie was "Huge" and might contain a whole slice of apple.

Tonight I think we will head out to Angel Fire. There is a spot there called the Roasted Clove that has a wild boar chile relleno on the menu.

The open road is calling to me. It is Monday and it feels odd not to be at work. I am purposefully spilling precious drops of time into idleness. It feels good to spend some time for myself. The sky is open and inviting. I am thinking of Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. I read it in college and the author's passion for this beautiful land is renewed in me as I watch the landscape roll by.

Price Canyon on the way from Utah to Colorado finally shows some green and cools down a bit.

Southern Utah offers some incredible road side scenery.

Safe and sound in Grand Junction, CO. Approximately 1100 miles in two days. Another three state day (ID, UT, CO). Tomorrow off to Taos, NM and the WeSTOC XIII rally. It will be good to see old friends.

It was a cool 55 degrees crossing Snoqualimie pass as I headed East from Seattle. I knew it wouldn't last and the day would get much hotter as I headed to Boise, ID for the first stop. I took the canyon road to Yakima from Ellensburg. Lots of folks on the water. I stopped and took some pictures of the farmland I had just crossed as I headed down to Oregon.

The Columbia was blue and beautiful. The source of life for all those apple, cherry and wheat fields. Not to mention all the vineyards.

It is hot an dry until you get near Pendleton. Then the land starts to ripple and you see trees and green grass.

A brief bit of high plains, then more mountains to climb. The Wing is running great and pulls up those steep grades like the cars and trucks are standing still.

As I head in to Idaho the plain gets hot and dry again.

Three states in one day. Tomorrow off to Grand Junction, CO.

Yesterday was Day -1 and focused on getting the bike ready for the trip. I have spent most of the first part of this year in Europe and so I took care of some chores that needed attention. One of them was preparing the bike for the trip.

I ran up to see Mark Reis to get some PIAA 910 driving lights mounted on the Gold Wing. Even though I am headed to an ST event (WeSTOC XIII) I have decided to take the Wing. It has had more attention in the last few years and is just better setup for long touring than my ST right now. It may be time to turn in my 1996 ST1100ALT for a new ST1300 now that they are available in red as well.

Here are some photos from my Nokia E51 of the PIAA work. Mark is an artisan and I know his work will serve me well. Plus he is a good friend and it is always nice to catch up.

With a 1 mile range these lights really help out with riding in low light or darkness. The first year I had these on my ST was actually the same year as WeSTOC III which was also in Taos, NM. I was riding through Wyoming with my buddy Bill Pratt. It was dusk and the road stretched out clear and straight ahead. We chatted on our FRS radios and decided to ride side by side and see if we could tell the difference between his white and my yellow PIAA 910 lights. We lit up the road and to our surprise we found that we were in the middle of a herd of antelope on both sides of the road. They had been completely invisible to us until we illuminated them with those amazing lights.

As the southwest is currently broiling I may find myself doing some night riding to avoid the heat. The safety factor with the PIAA's makes this a more comfortable proposition.

I also took some time to install a nifty little license plate/document holder I got from the Aerostich folks.

Today I will finish packing and do some route planning. I called Bill Pratt yesterday and he was already on the road so I guess I will see him in Taos.

Thanks to our friends at BMW for tickets to the VIP night at the 2008 Canadian International Auto Show. I do enjoy fine engineering and things that go fast. This was the black tie event kicking off the show. I had a great time and saw some really cool cars.

The new offerings in the BMW line include the sporty 1 series, the X6 and the Mini Clubman.

Ford had a nice Microsoft Sync kiosk for learning about the technology and signing up for further info (lead generation for Ford). I found it a little odd that the kiosk had no way to enter Canadian addresses.

A few other Ford offerings caught my eye. The Chip Foose F-150 was on display.

I was fascinated by the Ford Airstream concept vehicle. It was like a minivan sized Airstream trailer. This was a fuel cell vehicle and the styling was quite remarkable.

All the pictures were taken with my Samsung Black Jack II.

I am in Santa Monica today and tomorrow. I am speaking at a WPP event sponsored by The Store. The event is being held at the very nice Casa Del Mar Hotel. I managed to forget toothpaste and so I headed down to the lobby to get some at the lobby store. They were out, but while I was there I found the hotel has their own chocolate bar. I of course bought a sample (and housekeeping was kind enough to supply me with toothpaste).

This chocolate bar is manufactured by Vosges. The bar 85 grams and is presented in an understated box with with the hotel logo. At a reported 62% cacao it is a little lighter than I usually enjoy. Like many of Vosges offerings the chocolate enriched with a variety of interesting flavor accompaniments. This custom formulated bard had smoked Spanish paprika, alder wood smoked sea salt and roasted almonds. The paprika and alder wood flavors were most prominent providing a very lively taste against the smooth creamy chocolate flavor. The almonds and sea salt both added a certain gritty mouth feel. I not a big fan of this texture in chocolate as it tends to make me think I have just taken a mouthful of dirt. Once past my initial reaction though the unusual flavors were quite intriguing.

Oh and one more thing, I shared an elevator Robin Williams as I was returning from the lobby. It is my general practice to show respect to individuals with a large media profile by not accosting them as they go about their life.

Today's chocolate is an unusual Venezuelan. The Michel Cluizel folks have prepared an number of lines that are single plantation chocolates. This offering comes from a single plantation in the valley of Barlovento to the east of Caracas. It is a 66% cocoa mass and comes in a 100g bar in a handsome package.

I often use the Venezuelan chocolates as the finisher when I conduct tastings. I liken it to the perfect middle C of chocolate, smooth and perfectly balanced. It offers an excellent taste to contrast other chocolates against. This offering was quite unusual in that it was very distinct with a number of strong notes. It showed a strong spice flavor up front very like a warm gingerbread. A mild vanilla followed with a very strong lingering dark berry after tone. I very much enjoyed the surprise of the unusual flavors.

I am a big fan of  Microsoft Office OneNote. I think it is one of the most compelling applications Microsoft has released in recent history. I also love the physicality of my Moleskine notebooks as well. This new product from Adapx looks like it could bridge the two worlds. The future is bright for the convergence of paper and computing. I wonder how long before I can get an e-Paper Moleskine and equip my favorite fountain pen with digital ink.

Adapx Product Store - Capturx for MS Office OneNote 2007 Kit

My original post on War Rooms was made while I was at Microsoft. You can see it here, or read it below. (I could have sworn I took my MS BLOG down before I left but somehow it is still up.)

No I am not off my rocker or renouncing my beliefs and experiences with agile practices. I am a fan of precision. I like well engineered gadgets, cars, motorcycles, and systems. I prefer that our use of language is chosen with care to convey precise meanings. The term “War Room” is commonly used to describe a team collaboration space. Unfortunately teams generally go to a “War Room” during unusual activities – a bug bash, a production problem, a security breach. All of these are a crisis event. This is the root of why I don’t like the term “War Room.” For movie fans the quote from Dr. Strangelove is very apropos:  

“Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the War Room!”

I believe the default state of a development team should not be in crisis. The natural state of a productive development team is in collaboration. This is accomplished by having the team do the majority of its work together. One of the most effective ways to facilitate this is by putting the team in a common shared space. Calling this space a “War Room” commutates the team is in crisis when it isn’t, or shouldn’t be.

So what should this space be called? One of the neat things about language is that sometimes precision is emergent – it takes time and use of imprecise terms to get the collective social consciousness to reach agreement. I have seen these spaces called “Team Room”(bland), “Collaboration Space” (unwieldy), Pit (short but certainly not sweet); the truth is that the term “War Room” has what an oenophile would call good mouth feel. I am hoping that a good collective term becomes emergent soon.

If you have a better term please drop me a line. I would love to hear it.

Here at Blast Radius I have been doing the change agent thing as well and we are on our way to what we seem to be calling Team Spaces. I like that and it seems to be working well.

Today one of my top guys sent a link to a new study from the University of Michigan. They found that productivity doubled in collaborative team environments. While at Microsoft I managed to get funding for a new space designed around collaboration for the patterns and practices team. Channel 9 still has a video tour of the space up if you are curious.

A few weeks back I was hopping up and down shouting when I got to see the Seattle Sunday paper. On the front page was an article on Microsoft's innovation in office configurations and pictures of the space for the patterns and practices team. Michael Puleio who I had hired to be part of p&p was right there on the front page, and Peter Provost who took over my job when I left was quoted. Way to go guys. Here is a nice slide show from the Seattle Times that shows great pictures of how the office spaces at Microsoft are changing.

I am pleased that as an industry we now have some more quantitative research supporting what many of us understood at a fundamental level for a long time. This joins other research on agile practices (notably Dr. Laurie Williams work on Pair Programming).

These practices work and make people happier in their work experience. What have you got to lose by trying them. Come on in, the Team Space is fine.

Well I broke my Jawbone today. No not the one the attached to the bottom part of my skull but rather my Aliph Jawbone. If I had broken my OEM jawbone I would be having a lot of trouble using the built in speech recognition in Windows Vista to write this blog post. More on speech recognition later.

They say that admitting that you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery. I don't really want to recover from my gadget affliction so I am not sure I really want to admit to anything.  However, I do admit I am a bit of a gadget nut - well maybe more than a bit. I like to get my geek on. I had a Nokia 6310i and a Jabra BT100 Bluetooth headset long before anyone realized that wireless headsets were required equipment for a superior mobile phone experience. I have had a series of Jabra, Plantronics headsets since then. Some I loved, and some I hated. Once I got the hang of putting the Jabra BT 100 (then later BT 250) on my ear I came to love them. They comfortable to wear any had increasing better levels of sound quality in subsequent models.

I have an affinity for design - I like things are well designed, elegant, simple, work well and do the job. Sometimes I lag the market while I wait for a technology to mature and sometimes I'm willing to put up with the slings and arrows associated with being an early adopter.

In April I read a column by John C. Dvorak that mentioned the Jawbone. I travel a lot and manage a distributed team so I spend a lot of time on the phone. Better sound clarity and performance in noisy environments (like airports) is the holy grail of headsets. Combine that with an elegant design and I decided I had to have one. I placed an order that day.

When the Jawbone arrived I was reminded of a section in Guy Kawasaki's book The MacIntosh Way. He was writing about the importance of presentation of product. One of his examples was the packaging for the 4D database package from ACIUS when he was President there. He explained that a lot of work had gone into the packaging to present almost a "new car" experience. The package was black, sleek, shiny, substantial and even had a new car smell. I was reminded of this recently when I was cleaning out some old boxes and came across my copy of 4D for System 7. I hesitated to throw out because of the substantial nature and the beautiful presentation even though for me the software had been irrelevant and in storage for 15 years. (I kept it - for now.)

The Jawbone packaging was just like the 4D packaging. It was sleek and black and presented the Jawbone in a beautiful manner. Unfortunately it was too beautiful. Too beautiful is what happens when something becomes so beautiful that it loses its utilitarian functionality. I actually managed to damage my Jawbone when I removed it. A plastic clip secured the ear channel to the packaging and in my haste I pulled the rubber boot on the ear channel off and damaged the mounting tabs on the ear channel. I was a really disappointed with my new purchase because it was so hard to get out of the packaging. It should have been intuitive, but the hidden clip stymied me.

I was able to ignore the damage for a while, but eventually the rubber in ear boot would not stay in place. I broke out the super glue and soon the cyanoacrylate did its job and the rubber in ear boot and ear channel were one. Shortly after that my friend Bill pointed out that a Jabra ear gel was a perfect fit did a better job than the plain round Aliph in ear boot. Doh!

Using the Jawbone has had its moments both good and bad as well.  Everyone I've asked has reported that the call quality is significantly better than other headsets. This was certainly the case for me. So the quality of the product in its core value proposition of sound quality in noisy environment had been a success. The secondary (perhaps primary?) goal of being a stylish accessory for the face was being overshadowed by two other usability problems directly related to being too beautiful.

The first problem is the whole mount/dismount problem. Getting the hang of putting this thing on your ear is hard. I have spoken with other Jawbone users who agree that this is big problem. Sure it is beautiful and I may buy into the whole face accessory line and want to wear it a lot but I am certainly not going to be a proto-Borg and wear it all the time. I feel like an idiot when I am fumbling it on to my ear when I get a call and am juggling my phone with one hand and hoping I can get it mounted before the call goes to voicemail. Well designed products should not make you feel like an idiot.

The second problem is the root of my broken Jawbone. The USB charger is a funny little curved cup that you place the end of the Jawbone in. Several male connectors poke through the end cap and charge the internal battery. Now kudos to Aliph for including both a USB and a normal charger in the package. But minus 10 bonus points for the kludgy mating system to get power. The insert and remove cycle on the charging cup is fraught with peril. Each time you try to pull the Jawbone out of the charger you run the risk of pulling the little thing apart. I finally misjudged the effort and ripped the rear cap off while trying to pull the Jawbone out of it's charging cup. Whoops.

So I broke my Jawbone today because it focused on being too beautiful instead of super useable. Something to consider in your designs. I certainly hope I learned a good lesson here and make sure my designs strike an appropriate balance between elegant design and utility.

This Italian chocolate is presented in a small 45 g bar with a 70% cocoa rating. The Italians take food seriously so I had high hopes for this sampling. The bar was thick and snapped easily but softly. For a 70% cocoa rating the chocolate was surprisingly smooth and mild throughout with just a hint of a sharp bitter aftertaste reminiscent of old coffee left on the burner too long. The bar was creamy and had a nice thick mouth feel. Not a bad chocolate but I was hoping for something more enlightening. Three out of five stars.

This is a very fine offering from Lake Champlain Chocolates out of Burlington VT. The cocoa beans are from the island of Sao Tome. (Note the label is spelled "Sao Thome" and the web reports it as "Sao Tome".) At a reported 70% cocoa mass this bar is a little lighter than some of my more recent samples. The bar is delivered in a handsome package and wrapped in embossed gold foil. It is very hefty but surprisingly crisp. The taste is very smooth with a good fruit overtone and a very mild slightly roasted flavor to its finish. Strong Vanilla throughout and the consistency is excellent. Overall ranking 4 stars out of 5.

Recently I had a need to setup a local instance of JIRA to do some prototyping work and I decided to configure it to use SQL Server Express 2005. I have been working on our internal methodology and we are in the final stages of putting the practices into a set of tooling. JIRA is a nifty tool from Atlassian that is primarily used as an issue tracker for the QA of software development projects. It predates my time at Blast Radius and I am currently expanding its use from a QA only tool to a scope management tool.

In using Agile Methods for software development (and in our case for overall solution development) the management of work units is a core part of the execution. Derived from the Kanban cards used in lean manufacturing each work unit is small and well formed and requires good visibility. This corresponds well to the notion of an issue in an issue tracking system. In Microsoft Visual Studio Team System these are called work items.

Getting SQL Server Express 2005

Microsoft makes SQL Server Express available in a number of forms here. I chose to install SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services SP2 because it includes the SQL Server Management Studio Express. It also includes Reporting Services and Full-Text Search, but I didn't expect to need these features.

Installing SQL Server Express 2005

I did the install on a single computer running Windows Vista Business. There are a few questions during installation that you don't want to skip over to get the configuration correct for use with JIRA. Here is a set of instructions with the important screens.

I wasn't planning to use IIS for my prototyping purposes so the warning below that IIS is not configured to support SQL Server 2005 didn't bother me.

Next is the registration screen. Be sure to uncheck the Hide advanced configuration options. We are going to provide SQL Server 2005 Express some advanced configuration options.

I suppose you could just choose:

Database Services:

• Data Files
• Shared Tools

Client Components:

• Connectivity Component
• Management Studio Express

I threw in the other items for potential future use.

I just went with the default Instance Name. You will need to know this later to get the jTDS JDBC driver configured.

Now I cheated here and used the built-in System account as the Service Account. It would be a best practice to create a new local account to be the Service Account. If I had done this SQL Server 2005 Express should grant that operating system account the necessary attributes to run SQL Server 2005 Express. But, I didn't try that so I can't report on it. Be sure to make sure that both the SQL Server and SQL Browser services are checked under "Start services at the end of setup".

Mixed authentication mode allows me to have SQL Server 2005 Express accounts for holding JIRA data without having to have a local machine account. Nice for portability if I wanted to move this database or have another server access it.

Uh, defaults look fine to me for Collation Settings.

I do want to be able to administer this installation with my normal login so I check "Add user to the SQL Server Administrator role"

Always willing to help my friends at Microsoft figure out how to make better software.

Click the Install button and listen to the disk drive spin.

All done, hit Finish and move on to the configuration tasks.

Configuring SQL Server Express 2005

You now have some nifty tools in your Start Menu. Start the SQL Server Configuration Manager found under the new Microsoft SQL Server 2005 group on your Start Menu. Open the SQL Server 2005 Network Configuration node. Choose Protocols for SQL Express. As you can see TCP/IP is disabled.

Click on it and choose enable.

You will get prompted to restart.

Open the SQL Server 2005 Services folder and click on each service and turn and hit the little blue restart button.

Creating SQL Server Express 2005 Database

Ok, enough fun and games with installation of SQL Server 2005 Express. It is time to create the database and user information that JIRA will use.

Start Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express (found in the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 group on your Start Menu). Log in and you will get the main window. Right click on the Databases entry and choose New Database.

I need to work with multiple versions of JIRA so I am going to create a database and a user for each version. I start with jira393.

Now choose Logins node under Security. Right click and choose "New Login…"

Create user jira393 using SQL Server authentication. Once again I make a poor security choice and uncheck the password policy items. Be sure to set the Default database to the one you created earlier. Be sure to choose the new jira393 database as the default for this user.

Now we need to give our user permissions in our new database. Open the jira393 node under Databases in the main window and navigate to the Security | Users node. Right click on the Users panel and choose "New User…".

Enter the jira393 user name, the default schema jira393 (it will be created next) and make sure the user has db_owner role membership. Click the OK button to add the user to this database.

Next chose the Schemas node. Right click in the display area and choose "New Schema…".

Enter the schema name jira393 and owner jira393 and hit OK.

We now have a jira393 database with a jira393 schema and a jira393 user. Time to setup JIRA.

Installing JIRA

The directions for installing JIRA from Atlassian are pretty straight forward. Download the release you are interested in - I am using 3.9.3. The instructions for installation using SQL Server are located here. We have already done step 1 and 2. Step 3 (turn off SET NOCOUNT) wasn't something I had to do as it was already unchecked. I installed to C:\Program Files\JIRA-Enterprise-3.9.3

We will need the jTDS driver to allow JIRA to talk to SQL Server. I got version 1.2.2 here. Follow the instructions to copy the driver to the C:\Program Files\JIRA-Enterprise-3.9.3\common\lib\ directory under wherever you installed JIRA.

Next we need to edit the C:\Program Files\JIRA-Enterprise-3.9.3\conf\server.xml. The default install has as a section like this:

<Context path="" docBase="${catalina.home}/atlassian-jira" reloadable="false">
  <Resource name="jdbc/JiraDS" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
    username="sa"
    password=""
    driverClassName="org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver"
    url="jdbc:hsqldb:${catalina.home}/database/jiradb"
    minEvictableIdleTimeMillis="4000"
    timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis="5000"
    maxActive="20" />

It needs to be modified like this:

<Context path="" docBase="${catalina.home}/atlassian-jira" reloadable="false">
  <Resource name="jdbc/JiraDS" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
    username="jira393"
    password="password"
    driverClassName="net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver"
    url="jdbc:jtds:sqlserver://localhost:1433/jira393;user=jira393;password=password;instance=sqlexpress"
    maxActive="20" />

And finally we need to configure the JIRA Entity Engine. Edit the file E:\JIRA-Enterprise-3.9.3\atlassian-jira\WEB-INF\classes\entityengine.xml. Find the datasource tag and change it to look like this:

    <datasource name="defaultDS" field-type-name="mssql"
      helper-class="org.ofbiz.core.entity.GenericHelperDAO"
      check-on-start="true"
      use-foreign-keys="false"
      use-foreign-key-indices="false"
      check-fks-on-start="false"
      check-fk-indices-on-start="false"
      add-missing-on-start="true"
      check-indices-on-start="true">
        <jndi-jdbc jndi-server-name="default" jndi-name="java:comp/env/jdbc/JiraDS"/>
<!-- Orion format: <jndi-jdbc jndi-server-name="default" jndi-name="jdbc/JiraDS"/> -->
<!-- JBoss format: <jndi-jdbc jndi-server-name="default" jndi-name="java:/DefaultDS"/> -->
<!-- Weblogic format: <jndi-jdbc jndi-server-name="default" jndi-name="JiraDS"/> -->
    </datasource>

Starting JIRA

Finally we have it all ready to go. Choose "Start JIRA Server [8080]" from the JIRA Enterprise Edition 3.9.3 program group and JIRA should startup and automatically create it's tables.