THE BI Blog

Overall, we had a GREAT week at the Sharepoint Conference in Las Vegas! It has been encouraging to see the amount of enthusiasm and pent-up demand for BI.  Also, lots of activity on Facebook, Twitter, and various blogging channels about our newest announcement of PowerPivot (formerly Project "Gemini).  Self-Service Business Intelligence was the topic of the hour...

Keynotes and Sessions

-          Steve Ballmer’s keynote talked about Insights/BI, and showed BI in his video.

-          Jeff Teper’s keynote covered Insights and unveiled PowerPivot. We showed the PowerPivot demo that showed sorting through 100 million rows.

-          Tom Casey’s session on “Microsoft Business Intelligence Vision and Strategy” had about 1,200 attendees and standing room only. Tom dived deeper into our vision and capabilities, and showed a deeper demo of our stack.

BI Booth

The BI Booth enjoyed non-stop traffic, and during key times, it was packed! Most people coming to the booth want to see PowerPivot in action, so our PowerPivot stations have been very busy. MS IT’s Consolidated Business Intelligence has also received good traffic. The BI Racer is driving a lot of interest and admiring reviews, and people are saying that we have the “coolest booth at the show”.

Websites Launch

Check out www.powerpivot.com to learn more about Self-Service BI and become a Facebook fan at www.facebook.com/powerpivot.  You can also follow us at www.twitter.com/powerpivot

As you may know, Microsoft has decided to make the BI Conference into a biennial event, with the next conference in 2010. For 2009, we are excited to team with the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) to expand the BI tracks at PASS Summit 2009 and help deliver the content that BI architects, developers, and administrators need to get the most value from their Microsoft SQL Server and BI-based solutions. 

Four top Microsoft SQL Server executives will take center stage in a series of can’t-miss keynote addresses at the Professional Association for SQL Server’s PASS Summit Unite 2009 conference, Nov. 2-5.Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business (STB), and Ted Kummert, senior vice president of the Business Platform Division, will kick off the conference with an inside look at the future of Microsoft’s data platform. In addition, General Manager for SQL Server Business Intelligence Tom Casey and Technical Fellow David J. DeWitt of the Data and Storage Platform Division return to PASS Summit by popular demand to deliver keynotes on the next generation of BI and the latest innovations from the Jim Gray Systems Lab.

In the opening keynote on Nov. 3, Muglia will outline Microsoft’s key technical investments across the datacenter and cloud, exploring how they support the evolving role of database professionals around the world. Kummert will then deep-dive into the upcoming release of SQL Server 2008 R2, which delivers on Microsoft’s vision of enabling data platform customers to be more efficient through integrated tools. Casey will showcase real-life scenarios from customers using the latest BI advances within the data platform to make better business decisions. And DeWitt will take the stage on Nov. 5 to share cutting-edge developments from the Jim Gray Systems Lab.

The Microsoft BI team will be at PASS Summit 2009 in full force, sharing best practices and the latest information about BI technologies. We’re excited about our many sessions, including the always-popular BI Power Hour; a demo-intensive introduction to Reporting Services 2008 R2 and major new innovations to Report Builder 3.0; what’s new in Microsoft Office Excel for BI and Project Gemini for enterprise self-service analysis; and much more. The full agenda includes 2 tracks dedicated to BI, including 90-minute, in-depth Spotlight sessions and a full roster of Program sessions.

PASS Summit 2009 will be held Nov. 2-5 in Seattle, WA plus full-day Pre/Post-Conference seminars on Nov. 1 and Nov. 6. BI-specific full-day seminars include Building a Microsoft Data Warehousing Platform, Delivering Business Intelligence to the Masses and Data Warehouse Dimensional Design and Architecture Planning. 

To learn more about PASS Summit Unite 2009 and to register, visit the website at http://summit2009.sqlpass.org. Take $100 off with the code MSCOM3D (no expiration date)

You can also follow them on Twitter at www.twitter.com/sqlpass.

New Orleans was host to the Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference 2009 this week. With over 8,000 in attendance the WPC is a yearly opportunity for MS partners to connect with each other and gain insight into Microsoft’s strategy and direction.  I was able to attend the conference and wanted to provide a roundup for the exposure around Business Intelligence and some of the announcements that were made.

First off, be sure to check out the conference keynotes sessions at www.digitalwpc.com all of the keynotes I mention as highlights below can be found there and I’m working on getting snippets to post to the blog in future.

Ballmer gives a shout out to BI

Steve Ballmer delivered an energy filled keynote on day 2, here’s a link to a recent article where he highlights Business Intelligence: Business intelligence, search and portals remain keys to Microsoft's business because these technologies have only scratched the surface in terms of the efficiencies they'll offer to businesses, Ballmer said. In fact, Ballmer said the "most frustrating question" he gets from CEOs has to do with the difficulty of finding the information necessary to make business-related decisions. Read the article

Business Intelligence and Office 2010

There has already been a lot of buzz around Office 2010, and from a BI perspective things are starting to get a lot more interesting. At WPC more analysis and insight capabilities in Excel 2010 were shown in the main stage demo by Stephen Elop (president of the Microsoft Business Division). WPC is all about the opportunity for partners and showcasing the investments Microsoft is making so they can make their bets and prioritize their business opportunities. Watch this video interview of Stephen Elop shot at WPC which speaks to the Office 2010 news announcements and the opportunity for our partners and the “big bets” that MBD will be making this upcoming year.   The video is posted on the WPC virtual press room and can be viewed here

Self Service BI demo creates tons of buzz

We had an exciting keynote and demo delivered by Bob Muglia (president of the Server and Tools Division) featuring project Gemini, the in-memory Excel add-in to analyze massive amounts of data, this will be available to Office 2010 customers as an add-in for Excel 2010. It was great  to watch the audience of over 8,000 at the New Orleans convention center crank the tweet-o-meter to the max as Bob gave the self service BI demo. Check out some of the tweets that came back about Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, and the new self service BI capabilities to come:

·         SharePoint 2010 Self-Service Business Intelligence is amazing.

·         100m rows in excel - I can remember when IV8192 was the end of the flat world before you fell off

·         100 Million rows of data demo on laptop in Excel 2010 by Bob Muglia Nice. (wow!)

·         keynote demo about BI changes in the future -- extending BI to end-users via Excel 2010 and SQL 2008!!!

·         fun to hear bob muglia talk about BI; he has so much passion for this area

·         whoa. i would like to see google apps load 100 million rows in their spreadsheet!

·         100 million rows? HOLY CRAP!

·         Great Gemini demo by an exec (Muglia). Self-service BI, indeed.  

·         Excel 64 bit client is going to be THE BI client tool. 100 million rows with fast response even on a laptop.

·         SharePoint 2010 Self-Service Business Intelligence is TERRIFIC :)

·         end users redefine BI with excel + sql

·         100 million rows of data in Excel on a laptop! In memory! That's what Office 2010 & SQL R2 are about.

·         Excel 64 bit client is going to be THE BI client tool. 100 million rows with fast response even on a laptop.

·         I was actually impressed with 100 millions rows in Excel 2010 on a laptop, sorting and filtering in real time

·         Self-service BI capabilities of Excel 2010 are really exciting. I predict this and several other features will drive migration.

·         Funny - they're referring to Excel "applications". So Excel really is the new Access.  

·         Looks like there will be some easy to use BI tool in the next version of Excel for Office 2010 next year.  

·         Awesome peek at Excel 2010 at #WPC09! Users can build reports out of millions of rows of data w/ease in secs! ^CT

·         new Excel self service BI with slicer means less need for OLAP and constant requests to DBAs for new reports

·         AWESOME demo showing Excel 2010 publishing direct to web. Allows end users to create their own online reports. Cant wait to use this!

·         Oh, Nice! 'Slicers' in the new Excel 2010 - Office getting even more powerful! 100 million rows of data? WOW!  

·         I think I just fell in love with Excel 2010

·         Muglia is demonstrating Excel 10 64-bit: 100 milion rows on a laptop with pretty fast response.  

·         MS demo with 100M rows of data in Excel from SQL is cool, but if your report has 100m rows u may have the wrong query.  

·         Well, that was sweet. Excel 2010 with over a million rows of data on a laptop, just scrolling up and down, no prob.

·         Looks like there will be some easy to use business intelligence tool in the next version of Excel for Office 2010 next year.  

·         BI. Enabling end users to work with business data. 100 mi rows on a laptop! Office 2010 excel.  

·         Excel demo with 100000000 rows on laptop  wow

·         Microsoft Excel 2010 looks pretty cool.

·         Still trying to educate users that Excel is THE BI client app at #WPC09 Haven't we known this for a while? Cool demo is using Excel 2010

·         Slicers and sparklines in Excel 2010 are bringing BI to everyone. Can't wait for Office 2010!

·         Excel 2010 sounds amazing

·         Excel 2010 provides BI for the masses by making it easy to build your own charts/graphs on and offline

Do your own Twitter search for Gemini, I tried searching on “100 million rows” http://search.twitter.com/search?q=100+million+rows

Haven’t seen a demo of Gemini yet? Check out some that I posted to the blog here

Announcement details

Get the full details on the Official Office 2010 announcements:

http://blogs.msdn.com/project/archive/2009/07/13/announcing-microsoft-project-2010-technical-preview.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/07/13/announcing-sharepoint-2010-technical-preview.aspx

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/default.aspx

http://www.digitalwpc.com/Products/AllProducts/Office2010

Finally, thanks to everyone for stopping by the Business Productivity and Application Platform booths at the showcase expo area, it was great to meet and connect with an amazing group of partners from around the world who are interested in the opportunity around Microsoft BI. Stay connected with the blog and twitter for more updates as we move closer to the technology preview for SQL Server 2008 R2 and the beta announcements for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

Cheers,

Nic

The bird is the word, follow it on Twitter.

Hi everyone, I haven't made an appearance on these pages in some time, preferring to let folks like Nic and Ben have all the glory of delivering the news on all the cool things that are happening around Microsoft BI.  But as they're both likely still recovering from their "Who can down the most Hurricane's in 10 minutes" contest I hear was raging at Pat O'Brien's last night at the Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, I thought I'd step in and deliver some nice news.

We've done a lot of work with our friends at Panorama Software over the course of the last six months or so to put together a great story for our joint customers around an end-to-end BI solution that takes advantage of their capabilities in advanced analytics, and our BI solution as delivered through Office, SharePoint, and SQL Server.  This has involved working with both their senior leadership team, as well as their engineers on ways that we can fashion a clear GTM strategy together, while allowing Panorama the ability to capitalize on the super cool offerings coming up in Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, and SQL Server 2008 R2, particually focused on Project Gemini.

I'm happy to link to a great press release that Panorama issued yesterday afternoon focusing on our efforts and their work to be a strong partner on the Microsoft BI platform.  Although we certainly compete with them in certain parts of our offering (as is the case with all our ISV partners, and is a fact of life in this marketplace), this release is proof positive that our BI strategy change is having the desired impact on the marketplace, and allowing our partners to leverage our BI capabilities to deliver their BI capabilities to our joint customers.

Look for more of these types of partnerships and announcements in the coming months leading up to the Office 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 launches, we're inundated with requests by former competitors and other BI vendors to work with us now to deliver the best solution to our customers.  We're proud to work with Panorama and all our BI partners on this effort!

If you have paid any attention to Microsoft in the BI space in the past few months you have likely heard a lot about PerformancePoint. Based on requests from customers and partners, Microsoft will make available the source code and project files derived from the PerformancePoint Server 2007 Planning module. This packaged source code will be called the Financial Planning Accelerator (FPA). The source code will be made available on a no-cost, individual license agreement and can be used to support or change PerformancePoint Server Planning functionality.

What does this mean for you?

This is a great opportunity for customers and partners interested in using the planning source code to extend existing PPS planning applications or look at building new planning applications. From working with customers in the planning space over the past 3-4 years we have seen a wide scope of use cases for the planning component of PPS, including those that go beyond traditional aspects of financial planning and budgeting and into areas of supply chain performance, human resources, and sales forecasting. By making the code available we are hoping to provide our customers and partners the flexibility to develop planning solutions that make sense for their organizations.

How does the licensing work?

Here are some additional licensing details; Object code files can be distributed to end-users with Microsoft SharePoint Server Enterprise Client Access Licenses (E-CAL).  End-user customers are required to have Office SharePoint 2007 E-CAL or the “E-CAL Suite.”  Any binaries created from the source files become company’s derivative works and are not supported by Microsoft.

How can you get the Financial Planning Accelerator?

To obtain access to the Financial Planning Accelerator a license agreement between Microsoft and the customer or partner is required. After that agreement is in place, download instructions will be made available. Please e-mail fpasupp@microsoft.com to request the agreement.

For more background on the recent changes to PerformancePoint and how SharePoint customers can now take advantage of the PerformancePoint dashboard and scorecard capabilities today, check out this page.

Keep up to speed by following the word on Twitter

The Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) has just announced sessions and speakers for PASS Summit 2009, coming up Nov 2-5, 2009 in Seattle, WA. The full-day Pre/Post-Conference seminar and Spotlight session line ups include some amazing BI sessions. On Monday, you can choose between Building a Microsoft Data Warehousing Platform, presented by MVP Brian Knight and Delivering Business Intelligence to the Masses by MVP Peter Myers. Friday, Nov 6 features a full-day post-conference seminar on Data Warehouse Dimensional Design and Architecture Planning by MVP Erik Veerman. 

The Spotlight sessions are 90-minute, in-depth sessions across all four of the PASS Summit tracks, with excellent presentations scheduled for BI. To learn more about the PASS Summit event, visit the website at www.PASSsummit.com. You can also follow them on Twitter at www.twitter.com/sqlpass.

I'm really excited about the upcoming PASS Summit event, and hope to see you all there! We're busy working on our session abstracts and will post them as soon as they're finalized!

Want to see a cool example of data visualization? This case study video that shows how the Tampa Police Department used Microsoft Surface to help law enforcement and emergency response crews provide safety, analyze what was going on and communicate better during the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl attracts millions of tourists and the Tampa Police Department was looking for a method of processing incident and event details in a manner that was intuitive and easily understood.

Follow the word on Twitter

Earlier this week Microsoft released its new search engine called Bing, only it’s not actually a search engine, it’s a decision engine.  What’s the difference? This business intelligence world is all about making better decisions and in today’s business environment we are faced with millions of split decisions that shape the choices we make in our jobs. What’s the problem? There is a ton of information out there and it’s not going away, it’s only increasing. Calling out the fact that this new world of search is all about making better decisions is actually very ‘BI’ng and separates Bing from other search engines as it categorizes information and provides the most important thing first. As the evolution of search continues it’s been interesting to see the connection between BI and search and to make sense of the information you are searching and make an informed decision. In a way Bing brings a certain sense of ‘PI’ or personal intelligence to all of us.

Check out some of the new ads for Bing.

Follow the word on Twitter

What is Bing and why should you care? Here’s a list of resources that will help you get familiar with Microsoft new decision engine. In the BI world we’ve have heard a lot about Business Intelligence and search coming together, Bing provides everyone with a new type of personal intelligence that can help us all with the business of our daily lives.

June 1^st webcast for Bing

Get the complete Bing walk through of all the new features for Bing on June 1st webcast

What is Bing and why should you use it?

Here's a video that shows what you can do with the new "decision engine"

What’s the deal with Bing and Virtual Earth?

Rebranding Microsoft Virtual Earth to Bing

BI Power Hour: Scorecard Art

Do you use dashboards and scorecards to display metrics and key performance indicators? Check out the artistic scorecards in this PerformancePoint Services demo.

BI Power Hour: Playing Risk with Reporting

Watch an entertaining visual display from the Reporting Services team in a game of Risk.

BI Power Hour: Sneak Preview of Gemini – part 1
Get a sneak preview of the new functionality for BI within Excel with Project Gemini. This demo shows how you can quickly analyze massive amounts of data, create connections to data, and share insights all within the familiar Excel environment.

BI Power Hour: Sneak Preview of Gemini – part 2

This video made its debut this week at TechEd 2009 during the Donald Farmer’s session on self service analysis with project Gemini. Watch for more details and recordings of the Business Intelligence TechEd sessions at TechEd Online 

Get more details about SQL Server 2008 R2 and register for CTP notification

Follow the word on Twitter.

Watch this short video from the TechEd 2009 showroom floor on how we are using mobile business intelligence on a Windows mobile device to track the BI session and speaker performance at this years show. The application is called PushBI developed by a company called Extended Results and a special TechEd application is available for attendee’s to download and use on their mobile devices. This has been a great way to see how we are doing with our BI sessions in real time as feedback forms come in and a great way for attendee’s to keep track of which sessions are happening all from their phone.

You can learn more about doing business intelligence on a mobile device with PushBI here.

Get more details on sessions and content from this year’s show will on TechEd Online, check back for updates.

Follow the word on Twitter

I get asked all the time about MS BI futures, where are you going, what's the strategy and vision. Today, I thought I'd spend a bit of time on some of the things that we have today. One of Microsoft’s best kept secrets when it comes to data analysis is the functionality that exists today with Excel 2007 and the Data Mining Add-in tools. Here are a couple of “how to videos” that show What-if analysis, basket analysis, and goal seeking analysis all with functionality that you can do today with Excel 2007 and the Data Mining Add-in, which you can download here.

Additional tutorial videos on analysis services, data mining, reporting, and data integration are also available here. I’d like to give a special thanks to Mary Brennan and Michele Hart and all the folks on the technical writing team that put together content like this.

I’ll be on the showroom floor next week at the Microsoft user conference in LA, watch for more updates on what you can do today with Microsoft BI and more sneak peeks into the future. If you are at the show make sure to stop by the BI section and say hello.

Follow all the update for MS BI and BI activity at TechEd on Twitter.  

Microsoft Virtual Earth Heat Map, this map is updated daily with H1N1 Flu Outbreak Map data.

Microsoft Live Search Maps highlights reported cases

Virtual Earth Swine Flu Mashup

 Follow the word on Twitter