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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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Watch a preview of creating an analysis model with Excel and Gemini.

Watch a preview of sharing a Gemini model on the web with SharePoint and Excel Services.

Watch for more news on Microsoft BI and project Gemini at Microsoft’s user conference next week, TechEd 2009, May 11-15. This year TechEd will host over 30 sessions related to business intelligence, check out the session list here. Get all the details on TechEd here.

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Watch an interview with Donald Farmer which gives a sneak preview of some of the things that will be presented at TechEd 2009, May 11-15. This year TechEd will host over 30 sessions related to business intelligence, check out the session list here. Get all the details on TechEd here.

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Here’s a collection of some cool Microsoft BI Demos that I use regularly to showcase aspects of the Microsoft BI stack and show interesting examples of what insight to information can actually accomplish.

Top 10 demos for Microsoft BI

10. Sales Dashboard in Silverlight – visualize sales performance, select regions, identify who’s a performer and who’s not in a very visual and intuitive way.

9. Hello Hockey fans – a fun example of how you could track your favorite hockey team using NHL data and Microsoft Silverlight

8. Sustainability Dashboard – how can lowering your organizations carbon footprint equal more money to the bottom line? See how BI can help gain access to information that will help your company become more efficient and greener

7. School District Uses Dashboards and Scorecards – check out this external SharePoint portal that allows anyone from school administrators to partners access information about grades and school performance

6. Oil and Gas demo – watch a demo of how an Oil and Gas company could manage their business with dashboards and scorecards within SharePoint Server

5. Mobile and Desktop BI – a very cool demo of business intelligence on a windows mobile device and monitoring metrics right from a desktop widget

4. Virtual Earth Geo-Spatial demo – business intelligence and virtual earth need I say more?

3. Futures preview, Self Service Analysis – get a sneak peek at project Gemini, in-memory analytics to analyze massive amounts of data quickly within an Excel environment

2. Futures preview, sharing self service analysis – get a sneak peek into project Gemini and sharing a self service analysis model through SharePoint.

1. Surface Demo – the king of all BI demos, shown last year at the Microsoft BI conference in Seattle, an amazing display of data visualization and virtual earth on the touch screen surface interface

Let me know what your favorite BI demo is, submit comments and share your cool examples, I’d love to hear about it.

Nic

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What is Microsoft BI? What is the Microsoft BI value proposition? How do the Microsoft products come together across SQL Server, SharePoint Server, and Microsoft Office to provide a complete BI offering from the BI platform through end user tools. Here is a recent slide deck for the Microsoft vision and strategy.

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2009 BI Conference Update: We heard from our customers and partners that due to global economic constraints to travel budgets worldwide, we should make the BI Conference a biannual event. The next BI Conference that was scheduled for October 2009 will be moved to October 2010 in Seattle, WA, and all further BI Conferences will be held every second year on an ongoing basis.

However, that doesn’t mean that we won’t be talking about BI this year. In 2009, Microsoft Business Intelligence will be a focus at TechEd (May 2009, Los Angeles), World Wide Partner Conference (July 13-16, New Orleans) as well as a core component of both the SharePoint Conference (October 2009, Las Vegas, NV) and SQL Server PASS (November 2009, Seattle, WA) in the fall. Recordings of the BI content will be available after these events.