After sitting in on a recent webinar looking at new features for Microsoft PowerPivot 2012 (v2) and a new product called PowerView I could not help but be impressed. PowerPivot has been around for a while now but PowerView is a new feature part of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 that must also run with SharePoint Enterprise Server. Although I'll not be covering PowerView in this blog (I'll discuss that in my next one) it's clear to say that this is a highly intuitive and interactive reporting tool that allows you to create rich and dynamic visualisations over the web.
One of the most compelling features of the entire Microsoft BI suite is the fact that it mostly uses the tools most users already have access to. Excel is a clear case in point but a lesser known example is Visio. Traditionally the preserve of IT network designers, in the Microsoft BI environment it really comes to life as a tool to build widely customisable dashboard components. Sure, SharePoint 2010 Insights has some nice scorecards, etc... but they do all look kind of similar and sometime users want to express their own corporate identity through a dashboard. If nothing else, it helps with the user acceptance. I've been doing just that for one of Maxima's current Microsoft BI clients and thought I'd blog about the techniques I've been using to generate a specific scorecard requirement where the format required not only conditional formatting of the colour in each KPI but the position on a grid as well.
I've prepared another YouTube video for the Maxima Channel this week inviting current, past and future clients to the Microsoft Customer Immersion Experience in the heart of Edinburgh. You can view it here - think I'm getting better at these but need some proper lighting next time!
You may remember the 2002(?) film Minority Report based on a Philip K Dick short story. The plot details need not concern us now – suffice to say it was basically a film about predictive analytics – but what I recall most about it is just how cool the future analytic-cop’s user interface was. Wouldn’t it be groovy to be able to do something similar with Business Objects I thought. Later I began to imagine the fun to be had if all this grabbing from thin air milarky could be deployed for a hi-tech ETL design interface.
For those of us who are entering the middle of our Business Intelligence careers, Microsoft’s offering to the marketplace presents a few challenges. One of these challenges is how SharePoint fits in the mix. We’re used to specific applications that deliver BI, are called BI and are used by BI people. SharePoint isn’t a BI application but it delivers BI and has significant BI tools. These though are frequently overshadowed by its other, more immediate applications. Document Management, Collaboration and Search are just three areas which, at first sight, seem to obscure the BI message. Where has our cosy old world of clicking on the BI icon or going to the BI web app gone?
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