Changing Direction - Back to Where I Was a Year Ago

I am happy to be part of the SPF Plus team again. After spending 8 months with Oakton as a Microsoft BI Consultant, I returned to my previous company where I worked for a few months in 2007. My focus with Oakton was mostly on relational reporting with Reporting Services, while with SPF I will be involved in implementations utilising SSIS, SSAS and Excel through Calumo. I expect my posts to get oriented more towards these products with some specifics about upcoming SQL Server 2008 implementations and about Analysis Services write-back, which is heavily utilised with Calumo as a way to send data for planning and forecasting.

Calumo is a Performance Management product tightly integrated with Excel and Analysis Services, allowing creation of Excel and web based reports. Some of its power comes from the fact that it allows cube write-back and stored procedure based write-back straight from Excel or the web. With the release of Calumo 11, SPF had done extremely well in improving problematic performance which was a bottleneck in the previous versions and, in general, rebuilding the product from zero. I was assured that not a single line of code was reused from Calumo 10 and my first impressions with the new release are very positive.

Also, SPF have recently become Microsoft Business Intelligence Partner of the Year for 2008, after being Microsoft Data Management Solutions, Database Management Partner of the Year for 2007 in Australia. Microsoft have clearly recognised the value Calumo adds to the Microsoft BI platform.