C/D/H Talks Tech

Author:

Doug Brower

I have been in the IT industry for 18 years and have been a consultant with C/D/H for over 13 years.

I am most excited about using technology that goes beyond best case installation to develop solutions and solve problems for clients. My most exciting projects are developing identity management and single sign on solutions and working with various Microsoft SharePoint technologies.

When I’m not working, I spend a lot of time with my wife and four kids. We enjoy sports and activities, camping and the outdoors. I spend whatever time is left running or reading a good book.

I like to say with my busy career and family, that I’m smack-dab in the middle of my life.

More about Doug
Articles by Doug Brower

I’m finishing up my week at the Microsoft Business Intelligence conference.  The conference was co-located with Microsoft Tech Ed this year, which seemed to work well, as there was access to SharePoint, SQL server and other experts and vendors.

There are a couple large stories in the Microsoft BI stack.  First, the stack is founded on SharePoint 2010.  With the exception of still having access to the default SSRS web experience, you simply don’t distribute BI solutions without SharePoint.

PerformancePoint is now a SharePoint service application, leveraging the SharePoint security model, as is Excel, Visio and other Office applications. This is an improvement over the previous server platforms in Microsoft’s BI stack.

But the newest story in the Microsoft BI stack is Microsoft’s vision of BI for the masses, or “Empower Your People”, as seen in the marketing slide.  The argument goes something like this: “People are making decisions right now in your organization. They are making them with or without information.  Why should gathering the information be held up in an IT work queue?.”

Most of this empowerment comes from the Excel and PowerPivot products.  If you haven’t seen PowerPivot, you’ve got to check it out!  Actually, PowerPivot isn’t really a product, but a technology.  If you own Excel 2010, you own PowerPivot.  You just have to download it and install it.  Microsoft is giving it away in the hopes that people will want to share their PowerPivot dashboards and reports.

In order to share PowerPivot enabled Excel workbooks, you need to have a license to SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, and you need to install a Service Application on your SharePoint farm.

PowerPivot really has to be seen to be understood.  Check out the demos and other information on the PowerPivot Demos site.

After a relatively shallow learning curve, each of these demos can be created in a couple hours or so.  Pivot tables, charts, slicers and filters are just drag-and-drop operations from the PivotTable Field list.

I didn’t hear the PowerPivot story this clearly at the SharePoint conference – the big buzz then was on VeriPaq and the ability to quickly load a million rows of data:

PowerPivot is an OLAP cube which runs in the Excel memory space.

OLAP cubes are fast because they are copies of the data in which answers are pre-calculated.  The calculations follow the cube design, which is based on extensive requirements and interviews that get to the root of the unknown, and how knowing will affect business decisions.  Too many pre-calculations will slow down the cube and make it useless.  Too few will leave the end user with unanswered questions.

PowerPivot’s cube is not based on RA and interviews, but on the data.  Statistical analysis is performed on the data and relationships between data are discovered automatically.  The more data, the better.

If the data seems to indicate that sales figures are statistically different between sales people, for example, then you’ll be able to slice the data that way.  Users can import data from a number of sources, including existing corporate databases, Excel, Access, flat file, XML, SSRS reports and other sources.

The SharePoint 2010 PowerPivot service application allows the Excel PowerPivot pivot tables to be shared via a web interface, as seen on the PowerPivot demo site.  IT can configure automatic data refreshes to the workbooks, monitor popularity and performance in different PowerPivot workbooks, and analyze and promote the data into more robust cube-based solutions.

I don’t think we’ll instantly get to the nirvana whereby business users are driving solutions from a solid SharePoint farm and trusted data sources, but I do think that’s where we are headed.  It’s pretty exciting technology and it will immediately enable IT to develop powerful solutions side-by-side with users.