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Spotlight  Message from Tom Casey, General Manager, Microsoft Business Intelligence Microsoft is uniquely positioned to as the only vendor who can truly deliver pervasive BI. Our decades-old commitment to information worker productivity tools has again taken a major leap forward with PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint. We are redefining how people work with data by making it easier to connect to corporate sanctioned data sources, external live data feeds, and data in pre-existing reports. PowerPivot for Excel lets people quickly slice and dice millions of rows of data in a matter of seconds using new in-memory technology. New visualization tools like the 'slicers' feature in Excel 2010 make navigating data across several pivots at one time much easier, and the addition of sparklines in Excel 2010 allow you to show trending information quickly, right in any cell. Upload your workbooks to SharePoint Server and PowerPivot for SharePoint helps you share, secure, and track how your solutions are being used by others. Given the pervasive need for accurate and actionable data throughout organizations and user preference for working in Excel, we are pleased to announce that you can activate the new PowerPivot for Excel functionality with this free download. You can become a fan of PowerPivot on Facebook or Follow us at Twitter. Learn more by visiting www.microsoft.com/bi and participate in the Alpha Geek Challenges, beginning January 21, 2010, to win prizes and gain widespread popularity! Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Unleashing the Business User John Hagerty writes, "It's common wisdom that IT has been the driving force behind business intelligence (BI) through the first decade of the 21st century. But the second decade is already shaping up to become known as the "era of the business user" with line-of-business leads taking an ever-more-prominent role in selecting and funding analytics programs. With BI-related IT skills shortages still plaguing many firms, business users have taken matters into their own hands and are developing and deploying more of their own applications. This trend is bound to have significant impact on the path that BI, performance management, and analytics take in the next twelve months." Read more
Product News Introducing PowerPivot for Excel Deliver the vision of Managed Self-Service BI to your customers. PowerPivot (formerly known as "Project Gemini") is an innovative data analysis technology that redefines how organizations apply and succeed with BI. IT managers can deliver corporate BI solutions and also establish a managed BI collaboration environment that gives business users the power to get the answers they need to make decisions in the familiar Excel environment. This facilitates information sharing and collaboration on user-generated BI solutions, and enables the IT department to manage user-generated BI solutions with increased operational efficiency. | • | Empower your users: On the desktop side, PowerPivot for Excel 2010 delivers unmatched computational power and advanced analysis features such as Data Analysis Expressions (DAX), with the familiarity of Excel to accelerate user adoption. Users can hit the ground running and transform enormous quantities of data from virtually any source with incredible speed into meaningful business information. | | • | Facilitate sharing and collaboration: On the server side, PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 provides a collaboration foundation so users can easily share their analysis models thru Excel Services in PowerPivot galleries, accessible virtually anytime and from any location. Users can enjoy SharePoint's attractive user interface-browsing at its best-and the same performance and features as the Excel client. | | • | Increase IT efficiency: On the operational side, SQL Server PowerPivot enables organizations to meet the challenges of self-service BI with increased efficiency. IT departments can use PowerPivot Management Dashboard to discover mission-critical workbook applications and keep an eye on performance, availability, and quality of service. Automatic data refreshing in SharePoint ensures the data remains consistent with the underlying data sources. By centralizing BI and data management, IT departments can ensure data consistency, integrity, security, and compliance. | PowerPivot changes the game of BI by satisfying user needs, IT needs, and business needs in new and compelling ways. Users can drill into any aspect of their business and gain deeper insight on their own. IT can proactively manage the user-generated BI solutions. The business benefits through maximized use of IT investments, higher productivity, increased agility, and better, faster, more relevant decisions overall.
Betas
Finally, what we've all been waiting for, November 2009 marked the entire next wave of Microsoft Business Intelligence is available in Beta. Grab yourself a copy of PowerPivot for Excel 2010 beta, Microsoft Office 2010 beta, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 beta, and SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP3 and try out the exciting new BI capabilities from Microsoft. | 1. | Explore the power of the PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint add-ins, and pull together data from across your organization or from outside the firewall, build analytic reports, and share them with colleagues through SharePoint. If you're an IT Pro don't forget to check out the PowerPivot dashboards that give you visibility and insight into what PowerPivot applications are being built across your organization. To learn more, Follow us at www.twitter.com/powerpivot or become a Fan at www.facebook.com/powerpivot. Check out our videos, customer testimonials, and contests to come in the new year! | | 2. | The new Business Intelligence capabilities in Excel 2010. Connect to an Analysis Services cube and try the new Slicers, Sparklines, Custom Sets, Write-back and more. | | 3. | Explore what SharePoint Server 2010 has to offer with PerformancePoint Services, Visio Services, and Excel Services, and explore how the SharePoint platform makes the BI experience much more collaborative through tags, notes, wiki's, etc. | | 4. | We delivered a big competitive differentiator with via PowerPivot and Self-service BI in SQL Server 2008 R2. Breakthrough Agility in working with data on the client continues to amaze business users and techies alike with SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel, garnering praise during its announcement at the SharePoint Conference a few weeks ago. Showcasing the new types of Insight & Oversight that are delivered through Analysis Services and Reporting Services integration with SharePoint. |
Customer Toy Maker Gains Better Decision Making, for a Lower TCO, with a Microsoft BI Solution In Microsoft, Radio Flyer saw a solution that met all their requirements, that was a better fit with current investments and skill sets, and that would deliver a lower total cost of ownership. Read the case study Kellwood Re-Emerges Stronger, More Savvy with Microsoft BI Solution Nearly 500 employees across the enterprise now access the information they need, when they need it. According to Kellewood, it's been a phenomenal turn-about. "We start every day with BI now. Our employees rely on it to do their jobs effectively." Read the case study
Events Announcing the 2010 Microsoft BI Conference - Register By February 28th and Save $300!
We're excited to announce that the 2010 Microsoft BI Conference will take place June 7th - 10th in New Orleans, Louisiana. This is the premier Microsoft event focusing exclusively on our powerful BI offering and this year's conference will center around the following topic areas: | • | Empowering End Users | | • | Improving Organizational Effectiveness | | • | Increasing IT and Developer Efficiency | | • | Partner Services and Solutions Delivery | | • | Customer Business Value | We're also excited to announce that this year's BI Conference will be co-locating with Tech.Ed North America 2010! With Tech.Ed being one of largest Microsoft conferences, there is significant opportunity to demonstrate the value of the Microsoft BI offering to a much larger audience while also creating added benefits for attendees of both conferences. BI Conference attendees will be exposed to additional networking opportunities with customers & partners as part of Tech.Ed and will also have access to the Tech.Ed keynote, pre-conferences, more hands on labs and a larger Expo showcasing more Microsoft demo stations, exhibitors and sponsors. Go here for more details and to register for the conference. If you register by February 28th, you can save $300 off the standard registration fee! SharePoint Conference 2009
The SharePoint Conference was held at the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Convention Center, in Las Vegas, Nevada from October 19th to the 22nd. This was the coming out party for SharePoint 2010 and featured some incredible content. The conference introduced the new SharePoint workloads, new features, and allowed plenty of time to network with experts and peers. This upcoming release is incredible in its scope and at this conference we announced Self-Service BI...PowerPivot!
Some of the exciting stats from this conference: | • | 7,400+ Attendees (94% growth over the last SharePoint Conference) | | • | 165 Partners Sponsoring and Exhibiting | | • | 240 Sessions | | • | 45 Hands on Labs | | • | 1 Marriage | For more on SharePoint Conference, please click here. Get Everything BI at PASS Summit 2009 PASS Summit Unite 2009 was held November 2nd through the 5th in Seattle, WA with full-day Pre/Post-Conference seminars on November 1st and November 6th. This Summit had almost 2,500 attendees come to learn about how to get the most value from their Microsoft SQL Server and BI-based solutions. At the conference there were many BI-specific presentations and material, including full-day seminars on - Building a Microsoft Data Warehousing platform, delivering Business Intelligence to the masses and Data Warehouse dimensional design and architecture planning. To learn more about PASS, click here!
Resources Chris Weber Promotes BI Check out this interview with US EPG Vice President Chris Weber speaking on how great Business Intelligence is!
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