Don’t forget the WACs!

When building out a test environment to start playing with a prerelease version of SQL Server 2012 you’ll quickly figure out that Microsoft has included a great to new tool to make powerpivot v2 configuration much easier.
The first step thing it does on opening is check your farm to ensure that SP1 is installed.  We built a clean test environment, applied SP1, June CU, and Sept for SPF and Server.  Still getting that wonderful error.
Just figured it out when looking at patch status.  The office web apps.. originally called the web app companions have their own service pack which is not included in with SharePoint.  You can find it right here.
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=26639

Microsoft Releases BI Roadmap for Power View

Phase 1 - 1HCY12:

Enable our existing SharePoint based BI assets (SSRS Operational report, Excel Services,
Performance Point) to run on various browsers (including IOS). This was
actually not shown on stage during the keynote but is pretty straight forward
to picture.

Phase 2 – 2HCY12:

Provide touch based and touch optimized experiences on multiple devices. Prototypes
of these were shown by Amir on stage on a set of WP7, Android and iPad devices.
Some in the audience have assumed that this
demo did mean that this capability would be available with Denali as a result.
That is NOT the case. We announced a timeline for it, not a release
vehicle. At this point, we are also not disclosing the technology choices we
are making in order to enable these experiences.

Phase 3 – Windows 8 Wave:

Provide an immersive experience on Windows 8 device. A prototype of
what this experience could look like was shown by Amir on stage during the keynote. Again this demo DID
NOT suggest that this would be available in the Denali timeframe. Timeline
is TBD on this as we will look to align with Windows 8 itself. We are also at
this point not disclosing the technology choices we are making in order to
enable this immersive experience on Win8 devices.

Now Customers looking to deploy and use Microsoft BI on mobile
devices today have a broad host of Microsoft partners available to them. These
partner solutions support a broad range of mobile devices and are built off of
the Microsoft BI solution stack.

Examples include:

• Decision Support Panel http://www.prweb.com/releases/DSPanel/iPad/prweb4351514.htm.
• RoamBI www.roambi.com.   
• Extended Results http://www.extendedresults.com/products/pushbi.aspx
• Install Free http://www.installfree.com/
• MobiWeave http://sketchmd.com/

Project Crescent is Microsoft PowerView–Videos Posted on YouTube

This evening I got a phone call that there were some pretty cool announcements at the PASS (SQL Server Conference) conference this week.  (Sorry.. I don’t do twitter) The details of those announcements hadn’t really made there way onto the web in detail so I grabbed the live stream of the key note and parsed out some highlights i thought people may appreciate.  (More on how to do that in a future post)   I uploaded those videos to youtube so they are accessible if folks are interested in watching them.  Some really exciting stuff coming.  I hope you enjoy these as much as I do.. dave

Microsoft PowerView - formerly project crescent
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5fwphWxNoE

A rich interactive way to explore data from the BI semantic model and then present that data in a highly interactive format integrated with SharePoint.  Multiple Pages in a single report to be able to tell a story with your data, and the ability to export live connected data into Powerpoint.  This is a real game changer technology!  For the first time ever visualize live data in a powerpoint.  For more detail click on the chart and it will drill down to support further analysis.  Can’t wait for release of an updated build with the power point integration but it may be a while as it was only completed "Last Night".

 

Microsoft PowerView "Touch"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vLLAdjGtrU&feature=youtube_gdata

This video showcases what's next for PowerView beyond the release of SQL 2012.  This includes a browser based experience for for IPAD and Andriod and rich touch experiences with windows 8.  This is some really cool stuff that answers the question of how Microsoft and SharePoint based analysis and BI can meet the mobile requirement as we leverage newer device types.

 

Microsoft Data Explorer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izFeh3WFX6o&feature=youtube_gdata

Data Explorer is a bit further out into the future but is worth knowing about from a long term perspective  This is a cloud hosted service preview which allows you to mashup or join across a variety of data sources in some new ways.  The demo will merge a sql azure database with local excel data with bing search results with web odata feeds from the Azure marketplace.  After establish the relationships, the data can be analyzed using tools like excel and powerpivot or even resold as a new data source.  This seems to build on concepts we have today such as odata feeds from reporting services, odata feeds from sharepoint, and the ability to mash these up in powerpivot today.  Very exciting and worth following this as it matures.  This will be in azure labs by the end of the year.

First Post

This is just a first post to try this thing out. Not really sure why people make blogs... but lets give it a go