Want to see a cool example of data visualization? This case study video that shows how the Tampa Police Department used Microsoft Surface to help law enforcement and emergency response crews provide safety, analyze what was going on and communicate better during the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl attracts millions of tourists and the Tampa Police Department was looking for a method of processing incident and event details in a manner that was intuitive and easily understood.
Mircosoft has release a video demonstration on the Business background to Gemini and SQL Server Kilimanjaro. It shows how business users and IT administrator will benefit from SQL Server 2008 R2 with self service BI from gemini in Excel 2010.
Kirk Haselden from MS has blogged some news about the upcomming Master Data Management product:
we’ll be formally announcing the go to market plans for the master data management product soon. If the number of emails in my inbox is any indication, interest in Microsoft’s MDM offering is really heating up. For those that may be wondering if the Stratature product lives on, I can definitely say yes. The core capabilities will be there, the people that came to Microsoft from Stratature are still part of our team and contributing with those that have joined since to deliver the next release.
Folks who wanted to be on the Technology Preview but didn’t make the cut off date don’t need to wait long as the TAP is around the corner.
I really want to see this, i’m very curious how the product is going to work.
A collegue pointed this great slideshow from 2007 with some great tips:
Business intelligence is on top of most enterprises’ buying agenda: according to Forrester, 41% expect to make a purchase or upgrade related to BI in 2007. Still, there are plenty of obstacles that hinder—or even sabotage—a company’s ability to succesfully analyze data and act on it.
My collegue Marc Valk has wrote an excellent blog post about Sharepoint and SSRS integration over multiple servers (not the default all on one box) with the famous double hop issues and how to fix them. Read it here:
Report Builder 2.0 makes it easy for business users to browse for and use centrally-defined and managed data sources. It does this by supporting direct connection to a report server as part of the design experience. It also maintains a list of recently-used data sources that show up at the top of the list each time the user needs to create a new connection in their report. One problem, though, is how to help RB 2.0 users find published shared data sources in the first place.
