Gemini - PowerPivot

Right now listening to Donald Farmer about PowerPivot.

He just showed.how to import a 4 000 000 rows from sql server. Really no magic going on, if you are on a slow network 1 000 000 000 rows will take a loooong time.

Also, since powerpivot is a column based store, datamining wont be available at this point. That ruins the data compression.

You will be able to add additional meta data such as calculated nembers and measures. Many functions, mdx-like, like a lot of time functions. So you can more or less skip olap...

The coolest thing though, is that you can import data from multiple sources, ie sap and the web and define relationships between theese sources.

Last post from sharepoint conference 2009

Final note from the airport in las vegas. The grand finale was at LAX at Luxor, real good clubbing.

In total, a very good conference, but not that many news. Last years bi conference in seattle contained most of the stuff here, but this time it seemed to work...

Over and out

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Connecting Silverlight Web Parts

In Bob German session about integrating Silverlight in SharePoint, did he demonstrate a sound solution of interconnect Silverlight application hosted in Web Parts.

As SharePoint's built-in support for Web Part communication is server side based, it require postbacks when transmitting data between web parts. This is bad, particularly for Silverlight apps as they (usually) loses there states after an postback, and it gives bad user experiences.

However in Bobs solution, the built-in Web Part communication are only used to mediate the DOM object ID between the Silverlight Applications. That enables a Silverlight Web Part to pass data using a HTML bridge. This technique allows instant communication and interaction between Silverlight web parts and Web part configurations on the SharePoint site as usual. Sweet!

Summary of Sharepoint Conference 2009

Ok, so there is one more day left at the conference, but we will be going home in the morning so I think it's time to sumarize the conference from a BI point of view.

I will divide this in Reporting, Monitoring, Analytics and a general sharepoint category. I havent heard one word about planning, so that is completly out of the picture from microsoft.

Reporting> Reporting services 2008 R2 is a great release! It feels like it is a stable and powerful product and together with the new features I think it will be a pleasure after upgrading. Except from maps, nicer looking charts and inline graphics and charts I think connecting multiple datasets to an object is one of the enhancements made.

Monitoring> Not so much has happened on the surface of performance point except the proclarity decomposition diagram. But a lot of work have been made integrating pps in sharepoint, and it's now more or less fully integrated. No more web sites "on the side". Excel services and Office web applications is also really cool. You can both view and edit a word, excel, powerpoint etc online without the client installed. They made an example of two people playing battleship on BI Power Hour. Cool!

Visio Services is a cool new addition to this area. Another way of visualizing information.

Analytics> The main topic here is Gemini a.k.a. Power Pivot. Really cool in memory database that can handle massive amount of data. However, I wonder how many users really are interested in this. I would say it's one or two per big company... Well, we will have to think and analyze this a bit further to see the true business value in this.

General Sharepoint> A lot of things is happening with collaboration and social computing. Everything is getting integrated and starting to feel like facebook. My site is developed, personal blogs and wikis, team sites. Things are starting to feel more mature.

Another thing is offline access to information. A lot of things is happening here. This is a part of the strategy, BI for everyone.

Cloud computing, Sharepoint Online is a strong focus from microsoft, that was made totally clear...

Finally, everything withing the office family is moving into Sharepoint. Integration is the key, so expect more on that area.

That's it for now.

Ssrs 2008 r2

Some great news from the new release of reporting services 2008 R2!

Maps, sparklines, inline charts etc and multiple datasets connected to one tablix!

Starting to look really great comparing to other vendors. Also the possibility to make an offline exe of a report, you could send a demo to a customer without the database.

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Business Connectivity Services (BDC)

First session of today was about the next generation of the Business Data Catalog, now known as the Business Connectivity Services.

They have now added write functionality, which is a great improvement. Also, you can now connect enitities to office. The main example was hooking up a customers table to a sharepoint list, and to outlook contacts and beeing able to edit the back-end system from outlook contacts.

This raises some questions regarding security which wasn't adressed at this point.

You could probably build som neat applications with the new functionality...

First day at conference

There were not many news during todays sessions and key notes, including Steve Balmer. To sumarize the message I would say cloud computing and collaboration is the main theme of day one.

Sharepoint online will be one of the main focus areas from microsoft, and you will be able to run a whole or partial sharepoint enviroment seamlesly. In other words, you can run your critical LOB systems in house and other not so central parts of you sharepoint farm within the cloud.

The other focus area is collaboration including Office Web applications - Share and edit office documents online without installed clients, Gemini (Now officially called PowerPivot) - 100 000 000+ rows for self analytics in excel and social networks - facebook-like functionality built-in in sharepoint.

Sharepoint 2010 and Office 2010 public beta will be released in november 2009 and first version 1:st halv 2010.

Now we are off to meet with the other swedish attendees.

Sharepoint conference 2009 in las vegas

We are attending the sharepoint conference in Las Vegas!

We will try to post information relevant to business intelligence continously.

Presenting the dev team: Richard Lautmann

The thing I like the best with working in the Business Intelligence segment is the possibility to make a great impact on a company performance.

The previous years I have primarily been working on shifting focus from our in-house developed products towards building solutions within the Microsoft BI stack. To achieve the same level of functionality within the platform we have developed a number of add-ins or packaged solutions by using the standard components provided by Microsoft.

I have also worked as a BI consultant in many projects and many roles the past 4-5 years. I am currently responsible for our development team at Business Vision and has been since april 2007.

My academic base lies within my Master of Science from the Royal Institute of Technology studies in echonomics at Uppsala University.