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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on January 29th

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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on January 29th at 6:30 PM. Julie Smith will hack sweet reports in Power BI. Innovative Architects will sponsor the meeting. And your humble correspondent will show you two new cool Power BI features: integration with PowerApps and Q&A in Power BI Desktop. For more details, visit our group page.

Presentation:H*ckin Sweet Reports with Power BI
Level: Intermediate
Date:January 29, 2018
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)
115 Perimeter Center Place
Atlanta, GA 30346
Overview:Power BI is constantly evolving; this session is an overview of the current elements of Power BI and ways to implement them, based on experience in the field using it. Topics include the Power BI Service, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Embedded, Pricing models and some details of Power BI Premium. Sample data set used in this presentation is from @Dog_Rates on Twitter.
Speaker:Julie Smith has spent close to 20 years moving data using varied tools such as MS Access, MySQL, and SQL Server versions 2000 and on. She is a Business Intelligence Consultant at Innovative Architects, where she has been implementing Power BI v2 and Azure solutions for the last couple of years.
Sponsor:Since 2005, Innovative Architects has been serving industries to help solve business and technology challenges. We provide business consulting, development and implementation services for Microsoft platforms which include BizTalk, SharePoint, .NET, Business Intelligence, Mobile Apps and much more.
Prototypes with Pizza“Power BI Writeback and Desktop Q&A” by Teo Lachev

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Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on January 30th

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MS BI fans, join me for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, January 30th at 6:30 PM. One of our most experienced consultants, Neal Waterstreet, will share his real-life experience in master data management with SQL Server MDS. I’ll update you on the latest with Power BI and SQL Server 2017. Prologika will sponsor the meeting.

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Presentation:Master Data Management with SQL Server 2016 MDS
Level: Intermediate
Date:January 30th, 2017
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346

Overview:In this presentation we’ll first discuss the position Master Data Management plays in an organization’s overall data strategy. We’ll review the key concepts, different roles and responsibilities that members of the team typically play, potential risks, and best practices to help you get your organization moving forward with MDM. We’ll then take a look at some of the features of MDS 2016 such as the different ways of processing data, security improvements, Changesets and Entity Sync that make it an excellent tool for MDM.
Speaker:Neal Waterstreet is a BI Architect/Consultant with Prologika. He has more than 20 years of industry experience. Neal is skilled in the entire BI spectrum, including dimensional modeling, ETL design and development using Integration Services (SSIS), designing and developing multidimensional cubes and Tabular models using Analysis Services (SSAS) and Master Data Management using Microsoft Data Services (MDS). He’s also involved with the database community and is the co-founder and co-leader of the PASS Healthcare Virtual Chapter and the Atlanta Modern Excel User Group.
Sponsor:Prologika is one of the most trusted names in Data Analytics. Our clients, from small businesses to Fortune 100 enterprises, derive tremendous value from our services. Our mission is to help organizations make sense of data by applying the latest technologies for descriptive and predictive analytics and get actionable insights. Your organization will spend less time mining for information and be better equipped to make sound business decisions.
Prototypes with Pizza“Power BI subscriptions” and “Update on deploying Power BI reports to SSRS” by Teo Lachev

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

ATLANTA MS BI GROUP MEETING ON FEB 29TH

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Atlanta MS BI fans, join me for the next Atlanta MS BI Group meeting on Feb 29th and 6:30 PM. I’ll present “What’s New in SSRS 2016”. Don’t forget to register at atlantabi.sqlpass.org. Nevron will be our sponsor. Vishal Pawar will do us a quick Prototypes with Pizza demo about the new features in the Power BI Feb update.

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Presentation:

What’s New in Reporting Services 2016

 

Level: Intermediate

Date:

Monday, February 29th, 2016

Time

6:30 – 8:30 PM ET

Place:

South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346

Overview:

Reporting Services plays an important role in the updated Microsoft on-premises BI roadmap as a platform for delivering paginated, mobile, and interactive reports. This is a great news for many customers who previously had to rely on SharePoint for BI. Microsoft has made significant investments in SQL Server 2016 to bring Reporting Services up to its new role. Join this session to learn about these exciting new enhancements, including HTML5 rendering, mobile reports, new report portal, Power BI integration, and many more.

Speaker:

Teo Lachev founded Prologika, now a Microsoft Gold BI Partner, in 2004 with a mission to help organizations make sense of data by effectively applying BI technologies. Teo has authored and co-authored several SQL Server BI books. He founded and has been leading the Microsoft Business Intelligence Group in Atlanta since 2010. Microsoft has recognized Teo’s experience in Business Intelligence and contributions to the technical community by awarding him the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status since 2004.

Sponsor:

Founded in 1998, Nevron Software is specialized in the development of premium presentation layer and data visualization components for .NET based technologies.For over a decade, Nevron has been recognized as a leading vendor of advanced Charting, Diagramming and Data Visualization solutions for Microsoft Technologies.Nowadays, Nevron is also the driver of one of the biggest innovations in the .NET world – Nevron Open Vision (NOV). NOV changes the .NET ecosystems of Microsoft and Xamarin by providing them with a single presentation layer API.

 

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on January 25th

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Atlanta MS BI fans,

Join us for our first 2016 Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, January 25th. Our sponsor, Panorama, will present Panorama Necto. And Patrick LeBlanc from Microsoft will present “Power BI for You” and show you how Power BI will disrupt the way you analyze data. Don’t forget to register at atlantabi.sqlpass.org.

Presentation:

Power BI for You

  

Level: Intermediate

Date:

Monday, January 25th, 2016

Time

6:30 – 8:30 PM ET

Place:

South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346

Overview:

Most of us are overwhelmed with data from all the different applications that we use on a daily basis. Bringing all the data together is often a very time-consuming and sometimes a challenging process. Even further, attempting to analyze and visualize the data poses new challenges that is sometime difficult or impossible to overcome. Now with Power BI this can all be made very simple. Individuals, ranging from novice information workers to advanced IT professionals can quickly and easily transform, analyze and visualize data using a single solution, Power BI. In this session I will demonstrate how to Shape Data, Build a Data Model, Visualize Data and share the results of your work using the Power BI Service.

Speaker:

Patrick LeBlanc is a currently a Data Platform Solutions Architect with Microsoft. Along with his 15+ years’ experience in IT he holds a Master’s of Science degree from Louisiana State University. He is the author and co-author of five SQL Server books. Prior to joining Microsoft he was awarded Microsoft MVP award for his contributions to the community. Patrick is a regular speaker at many SQL Server Conferences and Community events..

Sponsor:

Panorama Necto is a worldwide leader in next generation self-service smart data discovery. It leverages a suggestive discovery engine that simplifies the business users’ data preparation while automating pattern exploration and analysis. Panorama Necto is powered by a unified and governed visualization and unique collaboration platform.

Atlanta MS BI Group September 28th Meeting

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Come and join us on Monday, September 28th, for our next Atlanta MS BI Group meeting. The topic this time is “Enhancing Data Analysis and Predictive Analytics with NoSQL” delivered to you by RDA Consulting.

Presentation:

Enhancing Data Analysis and Predictive Analytics with NoSQL

  

Level: Intermediate

Date:

Monday, September 28th, 2015

Time

6:30 – 8:30 PM ET

Place:

South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346

Overview:

The pervasiveness of Big Data has created significant challenges for companies that have historically utilized relational database management systems to perform data analysis and predictive analytics. This presentation outlines the challenges that stem from Big Data as it relates to deriving value from data, the types of NoSQL data stores available and how NoSQL can serve as a data platform that enhances the data analysis and predictive analytics capabilities of companies.

Speaker:

Cornell A. Emile is a Senior Software Engineer with RDA Corporation. Since 2001, he has designed, developed, and maintained a data-centric solutions within multiple industries such as Finance, Digital Marketing, State and Federal Government using Microsoft’s BI stack. His main interests include database performance tuning, ETLs, Business Intelligence and NoSQL.

Sponsor:

RDA provides specific enterprise solutions that integrate software, managed services, and the value of the cloud. We help you assess the best platforms, then design, build, implement and support tailored business solutions that optimize to your specific cost, scale, mobility and security needs.

Atlanta MS BI Group 5th Anniversary

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Our next Atlanta MS BI Group meeting will be on August 31st. This happens to be our 5th anniversary! Thanks for everybody who contributed to the group success! We’ve come a long way since our first meeting with a dozen people to the attendance we enjoy today of 60-70+. Come and join the festivities and learn about sentiment analysis with Big Data & Machine Learning.

 

Presentation:

Tone/Sentiment analysis with Big Data & Machine Learning

  

Level: Intermediate

Date:

Monday, August 31th, 2015

Time

6:30 – 8:30 PM ET

Place:

South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346

Overview:

People’s sentiments and opinions are written in social networks. There are tweets, Facebook posts, book reviews, forum discussions, and more. These attitudes and feelings are communicated using text, with format depending on the social network. Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters and use hash-tags and Facebook messages can be longer.

 

This session reviews the different Natural Language Processing, text mining, and data mining techniques you can use for sentiment and tone analysis. Organizations can use the extracted knowledge for brand reputation, market predictions, and automatic learning. We’ll look at, Hadoop, data mining, Microsoft Big Data Hadoop distribution HDInsight and Azure Machine Learning.

Speaker:

Paco Gonzalez, a SolidQ Mentor, is the PASS Big Data Virtual Chapter Leader, SQL Saturday Barcelona Organizer and assistant at the PASS Atlanta BI User Group. 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:

TEKSYSTEMS is a subsidiary of Allegis Group, the largest private talent management firm in the world. Our longstanding history and industry-leading position speak to our success in providing the IT staffing solutions, IT services and talent management insight required for you to actualize ROI and sustain a truly competitive advantage in a fast-changing market.

 

 

Introducing the Reimagined Power BI Platform

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Come and join us for an information-packed meeting of the Atlanta Microsoft BI Group on February 23th. You will learn about Power BI vNext and Panorama Necto. Our sponsor will be Panorama.

  1. Introducing the Reimagined Power BI Platform by Jen Underwood, Microsoft
    You have seen glimpses of the new Power BI platform during the Public Preview reveal. Although it may not be apparent, Microsoft has totally reimagined the Power BI platform and user experience for BI professionals, developers and business users. In this new release, Microsoft has added Power BI Designer, developer APIs, custom templates/apps, hybrid direct connectivity to on-premise data sources without data copying, a native mobile BI app and other top secret enhancements that we can dive into by the time of this session. Please join me to further explore all these great changes and enjoy a fun demo-intensive session.
  2. Panorama Necto – Panorama Necto is advancing Business Intelligence 3.0 to the next level, bringing together the very best of Enterprise BI with Visual Data Discovery, providing enterprises with new ways to collaborate and create unique contextual connections.

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting Tonight

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Come and join us tonight for last 2014 meeting of the Atlanta MS BI Group. In the spirit of the season, I’ll revisit its most important tools and their role in a holistic and modern data analytics environment. Then, for each tool, I’ll discuss its indented use, as well as its pros and cons. We’ll discuss self-service and organizational BI, on-premise and cloud, emerging technologies, and how they complement each other in the context of Microsoft BI. And, Mark Tabladillo will do us a cool demo of the Azure Machine Learning Web Service. $60 Pizza Hut gift card and other cool door prices from Aspen Brands will be given away. Kudos to our fantastic sponsor TEKSystems for buying us food and drinks!

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on Oct 27th

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Join us on Monday, October 27th for our next meeting of Atlanta MS BI Group to learn about predictive analytics and how to actually do it.

Presentation:Mine Craft
 Level: Intermediate
Date:Monday, October 27th, 2014
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346

Overview:Why you should be mining your data and how to actually do it. Every company needs a rock star. We want it to be you. This session will give real world examples of data mining successes as well as walk you through how to get started down the path of data enlightenment, so that you too can say “I Am A Data Miner℠”.
Speaker:Mark Tabladillo provides enterprise data science analytics advice and solutions. He uses Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, Microsoft SQL Server Data Mining, SAS, SPSS, R, and Hadoop (among other tools). He works with Microsoft Business Intelligence (SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, SharePoint, Power BI, .NET). Mark has a national leader in analytics and data science (data mining and machine learning) through conference speaking and instructional leadership since 1998. He connects with people on LinkedIn and Twitter @marktabnet.

David McFarland is a Senior Manager Business Intelligence with RentPath, Inc. David spends the vast majority of his day trying to get out of useless meetings. He has no certifications whatsoever and is pretty sure Microsoft has no idea who he is, except when it’s time to renew enterprise software agreements.

Sponsor:Tegile
With demand growing for bigger data and faster service, your data storage choices can make or break your business. Accelerate your business with Tegile’s all-flash and hybrid storage solutions.