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Peter Koller's BI blogOn Microsoft's BI topology and BI in general
August 03 Bill Baker leaving MicrosoftBill Baker who has been championing the BI area at Microsoft for over 10 years is now leaving Microsoft. Baker had a big role in shaping the BI strategy and products at Microsoft and also had a central role in the Proclarity aquisition. I guess its time to break out those CV's :)
Update: Bill's new employer is Visible Technologies. Here's a little blurb from them: "Visible Technologies announced this week the appointment of former Microsoft technologist and business intelligence luminary Bill Baker to the role of CTO. His new role at Visible Technologies clearly validates the increasingly pivot role of social media management in the marketing mix and the need for rich data insight into online conversations." June 01 SSIS frameworkI guess most of us who have worked on more than two ETL projects have thought about building this: A metadata driven ETL framwork built on SSIS technology. Looks like Microsoft beat us all to the punch and have released one for SSIS 2008. April 25 New version of the Business Intelligence VPC from MSThere is a new version (version 6) of the complete, integrated demo virtual image available from Microsoft.
This is whats included in the VPC:
Update: Dan English summarizes what has changed from the 5.1 release here April 12 Could we get a better Excel provider please?I have been working with the Excel provider in SSIS for a couple of years now. It has been pretty frustrating. If you have a neat excel sheet with simple columns it works fine and even picks up on data types. Once you get working with real excel sheets with complex nested headers you are walking into a world of pain. You have to start changing connection string properties (IMEX anyone) and usually resign to using named ranges or dumping data into a flat file. To me this is very odd. One would think that a provider in Microsoft's own ETL tool could handle Microsofts #1 data souce a little better. March 17 MDXStudioI do not know how this has gone under my radar but there is an incredible tool for analyzing your MDX queries available from Mosha and friends. Having built a MDX parser in my previous life MDXstudio's treeview of the structure of MDX made me feel inadequate and small. March 05 Need some cool data?I know, I know: Its been ages since I updated this blog. Please accept the usual excuses: Too much work, too little time. Anyway I came across a Slashdot article about the United Nations making available a lot of its statistical data on the web to the general public. This should give you a nice break from Adventureworks when creating demos! December 18 Sending me messagesThere are a lot of people sending me messages and questions through MSN. Some of you I cannot reply to because of a problem with your MSN account settings. If you want a reply, please fix your settings and resend your Q. Enterprise Cube: Further verticalsThe Enterprise Cube solution I blogged about earlier will broaden out into more verticals. First out are retail and production which should go into TAP early 2008.
As a guy working for a MS purist I think this is pretty good news. When I say pretty, there are a couple of issues with this solution that I think will effect partners and ISV's:
The OLAP report reviews PerformancePointThe Olap Report has reviewed PerformancePoint. All in all it is pretty positive so naturally it can be downloaded from Microsoft. November 13 Enterprise CubeIn December Microsoft will launch its first (?) verticalized solution on their BI platform. The offering will target the telecom vertical. Basically what they are offering is the integrated BI stack (SQL Server, Sharepoint, PerformancePoint, Office) with intellectual property on top. This will consist of predefined data models, cubes, calculations, KPI's, reports and so on. The product is modularized into four subject areas: Customer Segmentation, Revenue Management, Profitability Management and Churn Analysis.
This fits very well with Microsoft's strategy of moving up the value-chain from being a pure platform provider to offering enterprise solutions and applications. Verticalizing is the next logical step and mimics what other players, such as SAP, have been doing for a while now. October 08 SAP buys BusinessObjectsSAP is buying BO for a whooping $6.8 billion. Read more about it here. October 03 Katmai SSIS profile taskI just saw a demo of a nice new SSIS task coming in SQL Server 2008. The profiling task allows you to output statistics on your data to an XML file (hopefully to other targets as well at RTM). The task gives statistics on things such as how many rows have nulls in a column (nullability), value distribution (number of unique values, what the values are and how many rows have each value) and so on. This is great for handling basic data quality issues and is a much needed improvement to the ETL toolset from Microsoft. September 24 Microsoft's MDM strategyLooks like MS is starting to flesh out its MDM strategy and integration of the Stratature technology into its own technology stack (under Office). Looks like we will see the first CTP release towards the end of 2008. Have a look at this link for more information. September 23 Want to work for the world's leading integrator of Microsoft technology?Just thought I'd put this out there since you people probably work within the MS BI field. Avanade Nordics (Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden) is looking for BI professionals to join our growing team in the region. We are primarily looking for senior consultant profiles with a proven track record with the MS BI platform. Drop me a line if you are interested and I'll forward it to the right people. For more information about Avanade visit our homepages: Avanade.com and AvanadeAdvisor.com. September 20 BusinessObjects for sale The consolidation in the BI market continues. Looks like BusinessObjects is getting ready to be bought, possibly by SAP. If SAP buys them we will have one less general BI competitor out there, a good thing for those of us working on the MS stack. The downside is that this will probably make SAP pretty self-sufficient in terms of BI (except ETL) giving us fewer opportunities for MS BI integration with SAP BW. September 18 Some thoughts on PerformancePointWith the release of PPS in the very near future I thought I'd share some of the thoughts I've had presenting, integrating and getting to know the product. A new worldPerformancePoint is another example of Microsoft moving up the value chain both in terms of offering configurable packed enterprise applications and targeting the upper-mid and enterprise markets. The dynamics family of products with Microsoft CRM 3.0 and the Axapta ERP system are other examples of this. This is something that we see happening at other big players too, such as ORACLE. The move seems logical: First you build a robust platform (SQL Server, SharePoint, .NET, etc.), then you build applications on top of that.
For Microsoft's partners within the Business Intelligence area this will present a couple of challenges. To be able to deliver technology within Corporate Performance Management one needs not only expertise on how to configure and integrate the technology, but also an understanding of the customer's vertical, functional expertise and knowledge of how CPM is implemented on the business side. Especially with the planning piece of PPS we are touching on the very heart and soul of corporations: How they model their business, how they set up their goals and how they plan to reach those goals. This requires that partners understand things like how to set up a budgeting and forecasting model, how to do financial consolidations to get an accurate view of enterprise performance and the whole process of planning for an enterprise with forecasting and budgeting cycles, approval processes, etc. Partners with a business consulting arm will definatly have a great advantage provided they can succesfully mate their technological know how with their business expertise. Tip of the icebergSeeing where the PerformancePoint product is placed within the Microsoft BI stack there is no question the product will drive a lot work further down the stack. Even though PPS is a packaged application that theoretically can pull data directly from source system I think this is a scenario we will rarely see. To the contrary I think the product will open up opportunities for taking a bigger piece of the BI platform cake: ETL, datawarehousing, OLAP and data mining. If nothing else, PPS will act as a catalyst for this, when customers start to realize the benefit of an integrated BI system built on cost effective Microsoft infrastructure.
IntegrationOne of the biggest weaknesses see with PPS is the lack of integration with existing BI infrastructure. As it is today PPS forces you to "restage" and "redatawarehouse" your data even if its sourced from a clean, consolidated data warehouse. Most of this will of course be automated, but it still fragments data and will probably require a higher degree of hardware investments than strictly necessary. There are unupported workarounds for this, such as adding PPS columns to your datawarehouse tables. But that is of course a less than elegant hack.
Getting closer to BI NirvanaWith PPS, Microsoft is getting very close to offering a true end-to-end Business Intelligence solution. This will be even more true when the Master Data Management aquisition Straturum gets integrated in the stack. Couple this with the portal, document management and collaboration features of sharepoint and the penetration of Excel and those of us working with BI on the MS platform have a very strong story to tell. August 16 PerformancePoint CTP 4 on connectCTP 4 is out on connect. Whats new directly from the docs:
The following Monitoring and Analytics features have been added to Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 (CTP4): Dashboards· OLAP View Sorting/Filtering. Users can now sort (by column) and filter empty rows/columns in Analytic Charts and Grids. · OLAP View Types. Users can now switch between grids and charts and also change chart types (includes bar charts, stacked bar charts, stacked 100% bar charts, line charts and combined bar/line charts). · OLAP Member Properties in Grid. Users can now add attributes of a member into the OLAP grid. · Cell Level Actions. Users can now see the cell level actions behind a value in an OLAP grid or chart. · Export to PowerPoint. SharePoint users can now export dashboard views to Microsoft Office PowerPoint. · Multiple Filters. Users can now pass multiple dashboard filters to scorecards and report views. · Dashboard Viewer for SharePoint Services Users can now add PerformancePoint Monitoring dashboard items to an existing SharePoint page through a new PerformancePoint Web Part. Dashboard Designer· Dashboard Designer Ribbon Changes. Usability improvements within the Dashboard Designer Ribbon, which is part of the Microsoft® Office Fluent™ User Interface. · OLAP View Configuration. Enables light configuration options on charts and grid (fonts, formats, chart legend placement, grid layout). · PAS Integration. Users can now add PAS report views into their dashboards. · Time Intelligence KPI Filters. Users can now add Time Intelligence expressions to individual KPIs. · Scorecard Filters. Users can now pass members from scorecards into report views. (Example: Passing the KPI Name to an SSRS report.) Excel Services Support· Excel Services as a Data Source. Users can now import tables or named ranges from Excel Services spreadsheets.
The Planning component of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 (CTP4) does not have significant changes from its previous release (CTP2). The following list contains the targeted improvements delivered by this latest release:
· Business Rule Templates. Several additional rule templates have been added.
· PPSCmd. The command-line tool had some additions to provide ability for scripting of overall system processes. For example, the ability to deploy and reprocess models and data.
· Migration. Additional feature work was done to enable migration of an application between two server environments.
· Jobs. Improved user experience for executing and managing jobs.
· Data Types. Dimension member properties now support more data types.
· Offline Cache. Improved management of locally cached objects.
· Templates. Additional report templates have been added.
· Review and Approval. Reviewers and Approvers can now manage submissions through a single dialog. Support has been added for bulk operations.
· Filters. Form and report filters now support dimension properties.
· Performance. Several changes were made to improve overall server performance. Additionally, Financial Job and calculations have specific performance enhancements.
· System Information. Error message reporting and system logging has been improved from prior releases.
· Associations. Improved capabilities for working with complex associations. Better performance handling large associations and movement of large data set.
· Security. Public interfaces have improved resistance to any potentially malicious attacks.
June 27 Two new CTP programs within PerformancePointJust a quick heads-up that there are now two more CTP programs on connect related to PerformancePoint. One is for Management Reporter, a tool that lets users create boardroom quality financial reports in Excel or RDL format (as far as I can understand). After skimming through the documentation it looks like this is somewhat similar to report builder but with functional features for reporting on financial data. There also seems to be out of the box Dynamics AX integration. Pretty exciting stuff if you ask me, and another hint of the fact that Microsoft is broadening into the functional space of BI in addition of being a platform provider. Update: Looks like this is the consolidation piece of PPS where you do your eliminations and so on. Not sure why the have taken it out of the "normal" PPS CTP. The other CTP is the Data Integration Toolkit which i dont know much about, but it looks more like an accelerator for integrating GL data than an application. | ||||||||
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