Without revealing too much, if you turn up for the “Budgeting, Planning and Performance Management with the Microsoft BI Stack” on this year’s Tech Ed on the Gold Coast you can expect to see the following:
- SharePoint 2010 + PerformancePoint Services + Excel Services in action
- Excel 2010 (What-If Analysis in Pivot Tables sourced from write-enabled SSAS cubes)
- An enterprise model showing some concepts and ideas
- New and enhanced features of the 2010 releases of SharePoint and Excel
Some background knowledge of the Microsoft BI Stack is very much preferable as it can get a bit complex at times, however if you are wondering how Microsoft Business Intelligence can deliver on the keywords in the presentation title you will definitely see some ideas.
- Seasoned BI professionals will see some new features
- Inexperienced BI professionals will see a lot of new features and an overall solution architecture which may help them to get further in the area
- Other IT professionals will see how Microsoft BI is on the way of making their daily jobs obsolete in some areas
- Business people (especially ones involved in planning and performance management in their organisation) will see how Microsoft can enhance/simplify/make exciting their everyday lives
- An especially strong warning for senior executives: You may feel like you are currently missing out and experience a sudden urge to allocate more funds to your IT department
Other
performance management, planning, presentation, Tech Ed
A few days ago I got asked by the IM Director for Avanade Australia Lionel Gomes Da Rosa whether I would like to co-present with him on Tech Ed Australia 2010 on a very interesting topic – “Budgeting, Forecasting and Performance Management with the Microsoft BI Stack”.
I have had a few planning and forecasting implementations in the past (one of which got presented on the Microsoft BI Summit 2007 – not by myself unfortunately) and I am looking forward to the chance to co-present at this exciting event this year. It will be a 300 session (meaning that it will not be an intro and the audience would need some technical knowledge to grasp the concepts in their entirety) and this makes it even more attractive from my point of view as it will be targeting devs rather than the general public. Nothing wrong with the general public, of course – just that I am a dev at heart :)
See you there!
Other
Tech Ed 2010
OK, my doubts aside, this is my first post about PowerPivot. Obviously the demand is high and the perspectives bright – so here we go…
There are a number of posts about using PowerPivot as a datasource in PerformancePoint and Reporting Services. You can find two links below (both at TechNet) and I will not repeat the content there:
There you can find a detailed step-by-step approach to using published to SharePoint PowerPivot workbooks in your reports. One thing which is not explained, though, is that you can also use any published DAX measures as report data sources, as well. They appear as physical measures in the PowerPivot Analysis Services instance and can be directly used in the reports. I found this fascinating, as now we can actually integrate even user logic into our reports.
In example, today I was working on a small demo of PowerPivot and I created a PowerPivot report integrating a relational data source and an OLAP data source from two completely different systems, which then got related to each other by State/Province . After that, I created a DAX ratio measure, which showed some relation between the Sales measures from each database. After publishing the workbook to SharePoint, I opened Report Builder 3.0 and to my surprise (well, I expected to see only physical measures for some reason), I was able to pull the DAX measure which I had just created and beautify the map of the USA based on its value.
The integration between the various components in the Microsoft BI stack is continually improving and with the latest few versions of the various components (labelled 2010 or R2), we are being empowered with richer and more powerful tools, covering a larger array of users – proving that the toolset is the best out there for both enterprise-level and relatively smaller customers.
Other
DAX, PowerPivot
After 9-ish months in the Australian Federal Government, I have decided that this is enough public service for me and got on board Avanade’s ship. A major change..even though both organisations are large it seems like the mentality is completely different. I hope that being part of a global company, partially owned by Microsoft (17% at present) and Accenture (80%), the other 3% are privately owned (by some lucky people no doubt), will give me the opportunity to work on some large and exciting projects. Time will tell, but I am excited with the new environment – moreover because I am now in Melbourne (goodbye, Canberra) and I will be able to participate more in the, no doubt, larger Microsoft BI community here. At least Darren Gosbell is here – hope to see him at some SQL Server User Group soon. And since Nick Barclay is also working for Avanade (in New York), I may also be able to keep close technological contact with him as well…
Other
Avanade
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