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Microsoft Case Study for Recall and Prologika
August 16, 2012 / No Comments »
Microsoft published a case study "Records Management Firm Saves $1 Million, Gains Faster Data Access with Microsoft BI". Prologika architected the data warehouse, OLAP cubes, and presentation layer consisting of operational reports, SharePoint management dashboard and Power View reports. Recall, a records-management firm, needed faster access to key performance indicators and more intuitive business intelligence (BI) tools. The company consolidated four data centers into a Microsoft SQL Server 2012 data warehouse. The solution's performance enhancements speed employee access to more detailed data. By consolidating into a data warehouse, the company saved U.S. $1 million in hardware and licensing costs…With help from Microsoft partners Prologika and Berg Information Technology, Recall started deployment in August 2011 and went into production in February 2012.
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Making Big Data Real from TAG BI
August 11, 2012 / No Comments »
TAG BI is organizing a "Making Big Data Real" event on August 23th and I was honored to be one of the panelists. Please join us if you can and ask me the techniques we use to implement multi-terabyte data warehouses on symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems that deliver reports within milliseconds and maximize your return on investment. "The Technology Association of Georgia's Business Intelligence/Enterprise Performance Management society explores one of the hottest topics in the technology landscape, Big Data. You have likely read the articles and the books and now you need to know more. On August 23, we will bring together a panel of experts for a most important session: "Making Big Data Real". Please join us as we engage corporate technology leaders and consultants that are on the cutting edge of this new technology landscape. We will tell you what Big Data is all about and how you...
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What’s New in Office 2013 BI: Part 5 – New Features in PerformancePoint 2013
August 10, 2012 / No Comments »
I'd delegate this one to the PerformancePoint 2013 blog, where Kevin Donovan, Microsoft Program Manager, nicely addresses PerformancePoint speculation, confusion and misinformation while also introducing what is new in detail.
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What’s New in Office 2013 BI: Part 4 – New Features in Excel Web Reports
August 6, 2012 / No Comments »
To demonstrate the new features with Excel web reports, I stood up an Office 365 Technical Preview site. If you have received Office 365 invitations already, make sure that you choose the one with the SKU E3. Otherwise, you'll get access to the administrator portal only and you won't see the SharePoint, Outlook, and other menus. Assuming you use Office 2013, you'll find that it integrated much better with the cloud. Gone is the Save and Send menu. Instead, saving to could destinations, such as SkyDrive and Office 365, can be now be initiated from the Save As menu by adding a new place. As before, once the Excel workbook lands in the Office 365 SharePoint (or SharePoint 2013) land, it's automatically available for web reporting. However, the most exciting new feature now is that the web reports are editable and end users can change the report layout with both...
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What’s New in Office 2013 BI: Part 3 – Improved Productivity
July 30, 2012 / No Comments »
Excel 2013 includes features that improve productivity. Here are the ones related to BI. Flash Fill Suppose that you have a list of customers with addresses. When analyzing the data, you might want to analyze sales by USA states but the data doesn't include a state column. Instead, suppose you have an address column that includes the mailing address, state, and zip code. So, you decide to create a new column. Now, instead of using a formula to parse the address as you would do in the past, you just enter WA in the first row. When you start typing CA in the second row, Excel figures the pattern and suggests to flash-fill the column. Notice that Flash Fill doesn't use Excel formulas and you won't get formulas in the column. Excel handles flash fill natively. Quick Explore This feature was included to allow you to quickly generate charts for...
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What’s New in Office 2013 BI: Part 2 – Power View Enhancements
July 26, 2012 / No Comments »
[View:https://prologika.com/CS/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/blog/7762.Geography.xlsx:550:0] Power View in Office 2013 brings the following new features: Integration with Excel 2013 – Microsoft has decoupled Power View from SharePoint and included it in Excel so you can create ad-hoc reports connected to BI models, just like you can create pivot reports. I hope the PerformancePoint Decomposition Tree will follow suit. New visualizations – This includes interactive and drillable geospatial maps and pie charts. Better support of tabular models – Power View now supports key performance indicators (KPIs) and hierarchies. Design and branding enhancements – You can now insert images and change the report theme. To showcase some of these enhancements, I created a personal BI model based on a customer dataset imported from the AdventureWorksDW2012 database (I attached the Excel workbook). To create a Power View report, click on Insert ð Power View button in the Excel ribbon. This creates an empty Power View report connected...
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Office 2013 Business Intelligence Highlights
July 25, 2012 / No Comments »
Jen Underwood wrote a great summary about what's new in Office 13 BI. Interestingly, you'll be able to drill down to lower location in the Power View maps, e.g. from country to state and then to lowest level you placed in the location zone when configuring the map visualization.
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Localizing Reports in SharePoint
July 23, 2012 / No Comments »
In a current project, international users indicated that they prefer dates and numbers to be formatted using their regional settings. Localization is a big and complicated topic and we've been fortunate that the scope was limited to just number and date formatting … or, at least so far. Localizing reports on a report server running in native mode is easy. You just need to use culture –neutral format strings, e.g. C for currency of P for percentage, and set the report-level Language property to =User!Language. However, this is not enough for reports running in a SharePoint integrated mode. SharePoint requires installing language packs as follows: For each language you plan to support, download the corresponding language pack. For example, to download the German language page, change the drop-down to German and download the pack. Log in a SharePoint Farm Administrator and install the language pack. At the end of the...
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What’s New in Office 2013 BI: Part 1 – Personal BI with Excel
July 23, 2012 / No Comments »
As you probably know by now, Microsoft unveiled the Office 2013 Technology Preview. As the portal page says, "we've Taken Self-Service BI to the Next Level". Indeed, this is where I believe we'll see Office 2013 emerging as a leading tool on the market for self-service BI. Based on my experience, business users love Excel 2010 with PowerPivot because of its familiar environment and ease of use. However, the Excel visualization capabilities have been lacking. As familiar as they are, pivot table reports are getting somewhat outdated. This is why I put enhanced visualization options on my wish list. This all changes in Office 2013 where the question won't be "Why we don't have modern visualization options?" but "Which visualization option should I use?" Microsoft decoupled Power View from SharePoint and added it to Excel to allow business users to create ad-hoc Power View reports that source data from the...
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Formatting Calculated Members
July 2, 2012 / No Comments »
Consider the following calculated member definition added to the script in an Analysis Services cube: CREATE MEMBER CURRENTCUBE.[Measures].[Revenue TTM] AS ([Measures].[Revenue Amount USD], [Relative Date].[TTM]), FORMAT_STRING = "Currency", VISIBLE = 1; When you browse the member in Excel, you'll find that the member is not formatted as currency. However, when you use SSMS and query the member, when you double-click the member cell in the query results, you'll see that the value is formatted as expected. Clearly, Excel has an issue with formatting calculated members and there is a connect bug report that has been quietly sitting in the Excel bucket for years. To Microsoft credit, we have a KB article "Description of the LANGUAGE cell property in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services". "However, SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services cannot determine the value of the LANGUAGE cell property or of the currency symbol for calculated members from the query context....
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