Its been just over a year since I became the Product Manager for SQL Server, BizTalk and Visual Studio.  I took on SharePoint in May, and have really enjoyed that, so I’ve recently taken the opportunity to move a short step sideways.

From today I will be managing SharePoint Server, Exchange Server and Microsoft Online Services (Business Productivity Online Services – or BPOS).

I’m going to miss SQL Server and the Application Platform stack, but I’m really looking forward to sinking my teeth into the online services business here in New Zealand.

Going forward you’ll see a few less SQL Server blog posts and a few more in the world of Online Services and Exchange Server.  At least for the moment.

Today at the SharePoint Conference, we announced the name of Project Gemini would become Microsoft PowerPivot.  Microsoft Powerpivot is an advanced Business Intelligence solution for Microsoft Excel that allows users to work with massive volumes of data (think hundreds of millions of rows) on a standard desktop computer (i.e. 1-2 Gb RAM) at near instant speed.

PowerPivot for Excel is a data analysis tool that delivers unmatched computational power directly within the application users already know and love—Microsoft Excel. Leveraging familiar Excel features, users can transform enormous quantities of data from virtually any source with incredible speed into meaningful information to get the answers they need in seconds.

Using SQL Server PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 (delivered thru SQL Server 2008 R2 in SharePoint 2010), end users can effortlessly and securely share their finding with others and work seamlessly in the browser with the same performance and features as the Excel client. PowerPivot for SharePoint even helps IT departments improve their operational efficiencies through SharePoint-based management tool called PowerPivot Management Dashboard. IT administrators can track usage patterns over time, drill down to obtain more details, discover mission-critical solutions, and ensure performance by making sure users have the appropriate resources.

The Microsoft Business Intelligence strategy differs from most other BI offerings in that the goal is not to sell high price per user solutions that are available only to a select few in the organization (due to price).  Instead Microsoft is working hard to integrate Business Intelligence into the core data oriented products that Microsoft already sells and ships to customers – namely SQL Server, SharePoint Server and Microsoft Office.  As organizations tend to license these products for everyone, the Microsoft vision and strategy is to deliver Business Intelligence to everyone in the organization at commodity prices.

The future of Microsoft’s Business Intelligence offering is very exciting, if you are interested in BI, then stay tuned – the world is changing rapidly.

*UPDATE* More information now available on the Gemini team blog here.

There are some great Business Intelligence courses coming up that I thought I’d let you all know of.

One day BI Launchpad course

Firstly there is one later this month with Peter Ward (SQL Server MVP from Australia) who is running a one day hands on course designed to show how SQL Server 2008 can be used to solve different types of business intelligence problems, from data warehousing to real time operational reporting and analytics.  If you go, you will:

…learn how to use the SQL Server BI toolset to collect data from heterogeneous data sources and then display the data in a meaningful format to assist in making business decisions and then measure and monitor the results.  This course provides an end to end overview of the entire SQL Server BI stack from extracting data using Integration Services to building cubes with Analysis Services and then displaying the results using Reporting Services.

Full details of this course is available in a PDF for both Auckland, (July 20) and Wellington, (July 21).  FWIW, Peter is very knowledgeable, and SQL Server is his specialty, so this is bound to be a good investment of one day of your time.

Four day BI Depth course

In addition, Altis Consulting are pleased to announce a four day Kimball Group course to be h eld in Sydney in October 2009.  This course is entitled “Microsoft Data Warehouse in Depth” and will run in Sydney from October 20-23rd.  It is presented by Warren Thornthwaite and Joy Mundy, co-authors of the best selling Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit.

This course is designed to appeal to all major roles on a data warehouse project  on the Microsoft platform.  It’s for DW team managers, system architects, ETL system architects and developers, data warehouse operational staff, and BI application designers and developers.  Every attendee in this class will receive a copy of the Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit.

You can download the course brochure here, registration is available now from here. Additional information is available from the Altis Consulting web site.

A while ago I did a presentation for the Auckland SQL Server User Group (and last years SQL PASS Community Connection).  The topic was building a  business case for SQL Server. 

Since then several people have asked me to post the slides to my blog, but while I’m not going to post the slides here at this stage, I thought I’d do the next best thing and post the model I used to build the business case.

To do this effectively we need to have a framework for building the business case.  The framework I used is a model that Mark Carroll a colleague from my DPE days came up with (incidentally Mark came up with this model before he joined Microsoft).  Mark called the model the 8 business drivers, I’m going to call it the “Mark Carroll business driver model” because it sounds more official and gives Mark the credit for it.  The model looks approximately like this:

1. Tangible costs (How much does the product cost to purchase or maintain?)

2. Skills availability (How easy is it to get people to work on it or solve short term skills shortages?)

3. Customer requirements (Does it meet the stated business requirements?  What about unstated requirements?)

4. Third party products and services (What sort of ecosystem and partner network is there for this product?)

5. Standards and Methodology fit (How will it fit with my business methods? How does it work with established standards?)

6. User Functionality requirements (How easy is the product to learn (i.e. discoverable)? Is there a consistent user experience/paradigm?)

7. Timeliness (What is the time from order to deployment? How quickly can it be modified or customized?)

8. Life expectancy (How long will the vendor be around? How long will they support the product for? Will there be a migration path to the next version?)

If you use these 8 business drivers to build your business case, you’ll find the answers that you are looking for.

Perhaps in a future post I’ll plug SQL Server into this and show how it measures up against this model.

Last week we announced changes to our Business Intelligence roadmap.  In short this means that we are progressing with our vision to empower all users with Business Intelligence capabilities by migrating the scorecarding, dashboard and analytics functions of PerformancePoint Server into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server in the Office 14 wave and discontinuing investment in PerformancePoint Server beyond Service pack 3 for PerformancePoint Server 2007.

For more details on this announcement, I encourage you to watch this short video (5:19) by Guy Weismantel, the director of Microsoft Business Intelligence.  Also have a read of the announcement on the BI blog here.

I've been waiting for this for a while. If you are looking at a comprehensive BI solution, Microsoft has the answer. 

With the release of Service Pack 2 for Performance Point Server 2007, you can now run Performance Point Server over SQL Server 2008.

From the blurb:

With this new Service Pack, customers will see improved query performance in PerformancePoint Server scorecards, support for SQL Server 2008, increased compatibility with Windows Server 2008, including support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, and more filtering capabilities for PerformancePoint Server dashboards. These enhancements boost the already robust capabilities of PerformancePoint Server 2007, enabling organizations to effectively monitor, analyze, and plan their business.

For more information on Service Pack 2, see Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 on TechNet or Office Online.

In the new year, I'll follow up with some details about Business Intelligence and where PerformancePoint fits into the Microsoft stack.