Snowball - The Blog

From Bink.nu:
Preliminary product literature reveals that Katmai will be more deeply integrated with Microsoft Office system front-end tools, including Office Excel, Excel Services, Office SharePoint Server and Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, its business score-carding application. Katmai’s reporting capabilities will be more robust, supporting any report size or complexity.

Additionally, it will manage and accept nonrelational data types, including documents, geographic information and XML. Katmai provides more advanced data warehousing capabilities with Integration Services and Change Capture Functionality, and can synchronize data from devices to the central data store.

On the flip side, Katmai enables applications to interact with local data stores and synchronizes the local store with a central store for reference and line-of-business data.

Katmai also supports the next-generation ADO.NET data access framework to define business entities, according to the literature. Data entities can be retrieved and queried natively within any .NET language—compliments of LINQ (Language Integrated Query). LINQ support is built into the upcoming Visual Studio “Orcas” release, which will reach beta 2 by the end of this year, Microsoft officials have said.

Katmai integrates with Visual Studio 2005 as well as Visual Studio Orcas and supports the .NET 3.0 Framework.

The official release is set for 2008, no further detailed timeframe is annouced yet.

More info can also be found here.