Presenting at Atlanta Code Camp 2016

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I’m presenting Power BI Embedded at Atlanta Code Camp on Saturday, October 15th.

You have the app. You have the data. What if your app could put the power of analytics everywhere decisions are made and allow your customers to gain insights? Modern apps with data visualizations built-in have the power to inform decisions in context—for any user and on any device. Join me to discover how you can embed data analytics in any app and on one device powered by Azure and Power BI Embedded.

I’ll share my experience in helping customers embed Power BI reports. Learn how to:

  • Create compelling interactive reports
  • Embed easily for faster time to value
  • Deploy quickly and manage with ease
Find the slides in these locations:
1. This site

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on September 26th

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MS BI fans, join me for the next must-attend Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on September 26th at 6:30 PM. The Microsoft Ignite conference takes place this year in Atlanta, starting on Sep 26th. Kamal Hathi (General Manager for Power BI at Microsoft) and Pratap Ladhani (Sr. Program Manager at Microsoft) will be in town for Ignite and we will present at our meeting! This is a must attend session for everyone using or planning to use Power BI. Join us and learn why Power BI enjoys such a tremendous success and where Microsoft is planning to take it. Enjoy catering by Subway, thanks for Microsoft sponsoring this event.

Presentation:Power BI at one year – a look back and a look forward 
Level: Beginner
Date:Monday, September 26th, 2016
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)
115 Perimeter Center Place
Atlanta, GA 30346
Overview:This is a must attend session for everyone using or planning to use Power BI. With weekly and monthly releases, there are a lot of fantastic new features to explore in Power BI. In this session we will cover an overview of what has been released in Power BI across PowerBI.com, Power BI Desktop, mobile apps and APIs. You’ll also discover what’s new and exciting in Power BI. In this session, we’ll also introduce PowerApps – a new product from the Power BI engineering team which enables non-developers to create & use custom applications & forms across all platforms (iOS, Android, Windows & Web).
Speaker:Kamal Hathi is a General Manager for Power BI at Microsoft and a co-founder of Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar Analytics and Business Intelligence products. Kamal has delivered Power BI to market, and was responsible for its end-to-end strategy, design and delivery. Kamal is currently responsible for product growth and success of the Microsoft Business Application Platform.

Pratap Ladhani is a Sr. Program Manager at Microsoft focusing on Customer & Partner success for PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. He has been working with Microsoft for more than 13 years and has spoken earlier at Build, TechEd, Convergence & WPC conferences.
We expect other speakers from Microsoft to join us too.

Sponsor:Microsoft

2-Day Applied Power BI Workshop – Atlanta

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Are you looking for an agile self-service platform that doesn’t require reporting and query skills to get basic analytics done without reliance on IT?  Or, perhaps you’ve heard or evaluating Power BI but not sure where to start or how to take the most out of it? If so, this workshop is for you. A year ago Microsoft unveiled the new Power BI platform consisting of the PowerBI.com cloud service, Power BI Desktop, and Power BI Mobile. Since then, Prologika has helped organizations of all sizes to adopt Power BI. Packed with features, Power BI supports a dizzying variety of features and integration scenarios and it offers plenty to all types of users interested in data analytics: information workers, data analysts, BI pros, and developers.

Reserve your seat today to attend this insightful 2-day workshop for only $999 (use coupon POWERBI20160914 to get 10% discount when signing up two or more people) at the Microsoft Office in Alpharetta, when Teo Lachev (CEO of Prologika, a Power BI Red Carpet Partner) teaches you practical Power BI knowledge and data analytics skills that you can immediately apply to your job. See how Power BI can improve your usability and productivity even further.

Syllabus>>

Key Benefits

  • Understand how Power BI changed the way users (information workers, data analysts, BI pros, and developers) gain and share data insights.
  • Learn how to connect to popular cloud services to derive instant insights, create interactive reports and dashboards, and view them in the browser and on the go.
  • Discover how to integrate and transform data from virtually everywhere and then implement sophisticated self-service models and business calculations.
  • Find how to implement hybrid architectures and strict security requirements by leaving data on premise and deploying reports and dashboards to the cloud.
  • Learn how to share your BI artifacts and collaborate with other teammates.
  • Gain practical skills by creating a self-service model in the lab exercises.
  • Learn Power BI best practices, limitations (every tool has them) and workarounds.
  • Get your questions answered.
  • and much more…

You won’t want to miss this educational and engaging training event! Attend it and get a free paper copy of the book Applied Microsoft Power BI! Please register today as seating is limited.

Audience

  • Information workers
  • Business analysts
  • BI professionals
  • In general, anyone interested in self-service data analytics with Power BI

Prerequisites

Students are encouraged to bring their laptops for the exercises. Detail setup instructions and source files will be sent before the event.

Instructor

Teo Lachev is an internationally-recognized authority on Data Analytics and CEO of Prologika. Teo helps organizations make sense of their most valuable asset: their data. His strategy formulation, trusted advisory and mentoring, design and implementation services empower his clients to apply effectively data analytics in order to understand, improve, and transform their business. Teo has authored and coauthored several books and his latest one is “Applied Microsoft Power BI (Bring your data to life!)” He has been leading the Atlanta Microsoft Business Intelligence group since he founded it in 2010. Microsoft has recognized Teo’s expertise and contributions to the technical community by awarding him the prestigious Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Data Platform award since 2004.

Formulating a Power BI Enterprise Strategy Seminar – Atlanta

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A year ago Microsoft unveiled the new Power BI platform consisting of the PowerBI.com cloud service, Power BI Desktop, and Power BI Mobile. Since then, Prologika has helped organizations of all sizes to plan and adopt Power BI. Packed with features, Power BI supports a dizzying variety of features and integration scenarios but it might be difficult to understand how Power BI fits in your data analytics ecosystem.

Join Prologika and Microsoft for a 3-hour free seminar on Wednesday, August 31th, 8:30 AM -12 PM ET, at the Microsoft Office in Alpharetta, when Teo Lachev (CEO of Prologika) and Brian Jackson (Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft) share practical knowledge and experience to help you to formulate a Power BI enterprise strategy. If you’re considering Power BI but you’re not sure how it fits within your organizational data strategy, this event is for you.

Key Takeaways

  • Understand how Power BI changed the way users (information workers, data analysts, BI pros, and developers) gain and share data insights.
  • Learn 10 areas where Power BI excels compared to other popular BI tools, such as Tableau, Qlik Sense, Sisense, Domo, and others.
  • Plan a data access strategy for:
    • Importing data
    • Connecting live to cloud sources with content packs and solution templates
    • Connecting live to on-premises data sources
    • Implementing real-time dashboards
    • Embedded reporting
    • Taking a deep dive to learn how Prologika designed and implemented a hybrid architecture solution for a Fortune 50 organization and meet security requirements that prevented exporting data to the cloud
  • Join in a discussion about other business use cases and gaps between Power BI and other BI products, and find how to address them. Get your questions answered.

You won’t want to miss this educational and engaging event! Please register today as seating is limited: https://prologika.com/event/formulating-a-power-bi-enterprise-strategy/

Agenda

8:30-9:00 – Networking and introductions

9:00-10:30 – How Power BI empowers businesses like yours

10:30-10:40 – Break

10:40-11:45 – Plan a data access strategy and go “under the hood” of a hybrid architecture case study

11:45-12:00 – Q&A

Presenters

Teo Lachev is an internationally-recognized authority on Data Analytics and CEO of Prologika. Teo helps organizations make sense of their most valuable asset: their data. His strategy formulation, trusted advisory and mentoring, design and implementation services empower his clients to apply effectively data analytics in order to understand, improve, and transform their business. Teo has authored and coauthored several books and his latest one is “Applied Microsoft Power BI (Bring your data to life!)” Prologika is a Microsoft Gold Partner in Data Analytics, demonstrating a “best-in-class” ability and commitment to meet Microsoft customers’ evolving needs and distinguishing itself within the top one percent of Microsoft’s partner ecosystem. Learn more at www.prologika.com.

Brian Jackson is a Microsoft Certified Architect and Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. He has deep technical expertise in the SQL Server and Azure platform and served as a subject matter expert for Microsoft’s SQL Server Master and Business Intelligence certification programs. Brian has more than 20 years of experience in solution architecture and software development with a focus on business intelligence, data warehousing and database design. He has strong customer relationship skills with over 15 of years of IT consulting to several Fortune 500 companies and proven success in leading and delivering large scale implementations with globally distributed teams.

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on July 25th

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MS BI fans, join me for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on July 25th at 6:30 PM. Shabnam Watson will teach you MDX fundamentals. Pyramid Analytics, our sponsor, will show us why they are Microsoft Power BI preferred vendor. And I’ll demo the Power BI Publisher for Excel.

Rate this meetinghttp://aka.ms/PUGSurvey, PUG ID: 104
Presentation:A SQL Developer’s Guide to MDX Basics
Level: Intermediate
Date:Monday, July 25th, 2016
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346

Overview:MDX is an industry standard query language for OLAP systems and is used to query Microsoft Analysis Services (SSAS). Custom MDX queries can be authored in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), Reporting Services, Power BI and custom applications. While SQL and MDX share some common keywords, they have very different syntax and concepts. This session is for anyone familiar with SQL who wants to get started with MDX.
In this session we will first explore data organization in SSAS in multidimensional mode using AdventureWorks sample database. Then we will review a couple of MDX and SQL queries that return the same results and continue to learn MDX fundamentals by running queries in SSMS. We will see how certain queries are much easier to write in MDX, especially when it comes to querying data with hierarchies such as a date rollup. Finally, we will learn how to capture MDX queries generated by Excel and SSMS, to use as practical examples of how to write MDX queries.
Speaker:Shabnam Watson is an independent business intelligence consultant with 15 years of experience developing end-to-end data warehouse and business intelligence solutions using Microsoft technologies. She holds a master’s degree in computer science and a Certified Business Intelligence Professional (CBIP) certification by The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI). She has worked with OLAP since SQL Server 7.0 and specializes in solving complex MDX and design challenges with Analysis Services.
Sponsor:Pyramid Analytics is a global BI&A leader offering an analytics platform that helps companies compete as world-class data-driven organizations. Pyramid Analytics’ mature BI Office Version 6 is an enterprise business analytics platform that puts the power of analytics into the hands of every user across an organization, making it possible to model, discover, communicate and distribute data for better corporate decision making. Pyramid Analytics was again recognized in Gartner’s 2016 Magic Quadrant Business Intelligence and Analytics (BI&A) Platforms Report for BI Office’s capabilities as a balanced analytics platform with strong governance, metadata management, security, and user administration.

Presentation for SQL Saturday Chattanooga

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SQL Saturday Chattanooga will take place on June 25st at UT Chattanooga EMC Building, 784 Vine Street, Chattanooga, Tennessee, 37403, United States. Your humble correspondent will sponsor the event and present “What’s New for BI in SQL Server 2016” scheduled to start at 3:45 PM (the organizers decided to keep the best for last J). Join me for an hour of coverage of my favorite SQL Server 2016 new BI features. Get your questions answered.

SQL Server 2016 delivers many data analytics and information management new features and enhancements. Join this session to discover what’s new for BI in Database Engine, SSRS, SSIS, SSAS, and MDS. I’ll also explain the SQL Server 2016+ near-future roadmap that will help you implement novel solutions and cut cost.

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on May 23th

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MS BI fans, join me for the next Atlanta MS BI Group meeting on May 23th and 6:30 PM. I’ll present the self-service data shaping and transformation capabilities in Power BI. Then Alteryx, who is also sponsoring the event, will show us how to bring Power BI data transformation and analytics even further with their products. I’ll also showcase two interesting Power BI new features: narratives and row-level security.

Rate this meetinghttp://aka.ms/PUGSurvey, PUG ID: 104
Presentation:Self-service Data Preparation for Data Analysts
Level: Intermediate
Date:Monday, May 23th, 2016
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346

Overview:Power BI has a lot to offer to data analysts interested in creating data models using Power BI Desktop or Excel. However, unless you analyze data stored in a data warehouse, data is rarely clean. Fortunately, Power BI Desktop and Excel include powerful data shaping and transformation capabilities that help the data analyst improve the data quality before importing the data in the model. In the first part of this session, Teo Lachev will show you how to use the Power BI built-in features to apply various data transformation tasks. In the second part, you’ll see how Alteryx can bring Power BI data transformation and analytics even further with:

  • Data Preparation: Quickly prep, blend, and analyze data from multiple sources for Power BI consumption. Deliver a repeatable workflow process to reduce the time spent on manual processes. Push datasets directly to Power BI to create rich visualizations.
  • Advanced Analytics: Utilize the power of spatial and predictive analytics in a simple drag-and-drop interface without having to write code. Add a new dimension of insight to your visualizations with advanced modeling tools to handle complex use cases such as Multi-Channel Analysis, Predictive A/B Testing, Location Selection, Market Basket Analysis, and more.
  • Text Analytics: Build repeatable analytic workflows and harness the power of Azure Machine Learning to easily perform sentiment analysis and extract key phrases from your data.
Speaker:Teo Lachev is a consultant, author, and mentor, with a focus on Microsoft Business Intelligence. Through his Atlanta-based company “Prologika”, a Microsoft Gold Partner in Data Analytics, he designs and implements innovative solutions that unlock the power of data and bring tremendous value to his customers, ranging from small companies to Fortune 50 organizations. Teo has authored and co-authored several SQL Server BI books and he has been leading the Atlanta Microsoft Business Intelligence group since he founded it in 2010. Microsoft has recognized Teo’s expertise and contributions to the technical community by awarding him the prestigious Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award since 2004.
Sponsor:Alteryx provides business users with the unique ability to easily prep, blend and analyze all of their data using a repeatable workflow, then deploy and share analytics at scale for deeper insights in hours, not weeks. nalysts can connect to and cleanse data from data warehouses, cloud applications, spreadsheets and other sources, easily join this data together, then perform analytics – predictive, statistical and spatial – using the same intuitive user interface, without writing any code.
Prototypes with pizzaNarratives and Row-level Security with Teo Lachev
Take a glimpse of how you can secure Power BI Desktop models with Row-level security

Presentation for SQL Saturday Atlanta

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SQL Saturday Atlanta will take place on May 21st. Your humble correspondent will present “What’s New for BI in SQL Server 2016” scheduled to start at 8:15 AM. Join me for an hour of coverage of my favorite SQL Server 2016 new BI features. Get your questions answered.

SQL Server 2016 delivers many data analytics and information management new features and enhancements. Join this session to discover what’s new for BI in Database Engine, SSRS, SSIS, SSAS, and MDS. I’ll also explain the SQL Server 2016+ near-future roadmap that will help you implement new solutions and cut cost.

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on Apr 25th

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MS BI fans, join me for the next Atlanta MS BI Group meeting on Apr 25th and 6:30 PM. Paco Gonzalez will present the Azure Internet of Things(IoT) and I’ll show you Power BI Embedded Azure cloud service. SolidQ will sponsor the event. Don’t forget to RSVP at atlantabi.sqlpass.org so we can’t an accurate headcount.

Rate this meetinghttp://aka.ms/PUGSurvey, PUG ID: 104
Presentation:Introduction to Azure Internet of Things (IoT)
Level: Intermediate
Date:Monday, April 25th, 2016
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346

Overview:The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects—devices, vehicles, buildings and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity that enables these objects to collect and exchange data. The Azure Internet of Things (IoT) Suite brings the Internet of your things to life. Connect your devices, analyze previously-untapped data, integrate business systems to transform your company when you uncover new business models and revenue streams. Join this session for a quick introduction and group discussion.
Speaker:Paco Gonzalez is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and SolidQ Mentor, is the PASS Big Data Virtual Chapter Leader, SQL Saturday Barcelona Organizer. He is finishing his PhD thesis about: “Analyzing Social Data with Machine Learning.” He is an MCT and MCP on BizTalk Server and SQL Server. He is coauthor of Microsoft Training Kit 441. Paco is a frequent speaker at large and small conferences. SQL Saturdays, TechEds, PASS BA, PASS Summit, DevWeek London, and PAW Chicago and London.
Sponsor:SolidQ delivers services for Microsoft platforms that help you architect, integrate and optimize your use of data. The result? Our clients think bigger and move faster because we help them build the capacity and skills to interact with data in creative, collaborative ways that deliver new insights to the business. At SolidQ we measure our success by your satisfaction – and we guarantee it.
Prototypes with pizzaPower BI Embedded with Teo Lachev
Take a glimpse of how you can embed Power BI content in custom apps

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on Mar 28th

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Atlanta MS BI fans, join me for the next Atlanta MS BI Group meeting on Mar 28th and 6:30 PM. Luis Figueroa will show us how to do cloud ETL with Azure Data Factory. Allegient will sponsor the event. Don’t forget to register at atlantabi.sqlpass.org.

ate this meetinghttp://aka.ms/PUGSurvey, PUG ID: 104
Presentation:A Closer Look at Azure Data Factory
Level: Intermediate
Date:Monday, March 28th, 2016
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346

Overview:Azure Data Factory is a modern data orchestration platform design to help you manage any data of any size from any source. It also makes a number of technologies available to you such as Azure Machine learning so that you can integrate predictive machine learning models in your data pipelines. This platform enables you to create intelligent applications that not only provide insights but can also recommend actions upon specific events. Join me in this session as we take a closer look at many of the capabilities built into the platform.
Speaker:Luis Figueroa serves as the Practice Lead for the Data Platform and Analytics division at Allegient, LLC. Luis is focused on delivering business solutions that leverage the Microsoft ecosystem of products. His areas of expertise are Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Big Data and Advanced Analytics. With 10+ years of experience in the field, Luis has delivered data management solutions for companies across many industry verticals. Luis is also a Microsoft P-TSP and chapter leader of the PASS Data Science Virtual Chapter.
Sponsor:Allegient is a leading IT consulting firm that specializes in translating business objectives into technology solutions. We leverage proven technologies and methodologies that best align with your organization’s needs, resources and timeline. Focus areas include Business Process Management, Business Intelligence, Collaboration, Relationship Management (CRM/xRM), Custom Application Development & Sustainment, and IT Service/Project Management.