Browsed by
Category: Business Intelligence

DevConnections 2013 Recap

DevConnections 2013 Recap

DevConnections 2013 was an amazing conference, as it has in all years past. The attendees are always hyper-engaged and come with tons of questions. As a presenter, nothing makes me happier than helping people understand the concepts I am covering better than when they walked into my sessions.  Thanks to Scot Hillier for being an amazing track chair and moderating the panel on Tuesday afternoon. During DevConnections I did 3 sessions (2 of which were recorded) and a panel session…

Read More Read More

A summer of fun & SharePoint

A summer of fun & SharePoint

I am sitting in the Toronto City Airport after speaking at #SPSToronto yesterday and realized that I hadn’t posted anything about my upcoming talks. Yesterday was a day of BI. I did Heavy Metal PowerPivot Remastered in the morning, followed by John White doing SharePoint for Business Intelligence, and then I did Business Intelligence in SharePoint 2013. The whole day built nicely and the attendees grew in numbers from session to session. All it all it was a great collaborative…

Read More Read More

SQL Server 2012 SP1 is here & it’s huge for SharePoint 2013 BI

SQL Server 2012 SP1 is here & it’s huge for SharePoint 2013 BI

This is a massive deal for SharePoint 2013 BI.  Here is an excerpt from What’s New in SQL Server 2012: “Business Intelligence highlights (with SQL Server 2012 SP1, Office and SharePoint Server 2013 ) Business Intelligence highlights (with SQL Server SP1, Office and SharePoint Server 2013 Preview) are: Enable self-service BI as a natural part of users day-to-day activities in Excel 2013: Access and mash-up data from any source (PowerPivot). Documentation related to PowerPivot in Excel 2013 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=255958). Stunning visualizations…

Read More Read More

Hooray, it’s a book!: “Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint”

Hooray, it’s a book!: “Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint”

Over the past year I have been spending my night’s & weekends working on a book with my co-author, Dave Feldman, and I am proud to say that we have completed our draft of “Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint”.  Through the book you will learn to create dynamic Business Intelligence solutions for SharePoint, using Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch, SQL Server 2012, and other tools and technologies. This hands-on book shows you how to create data-rich BI applications with SharePoint…

Read More Read More

Getting PowerPivot & Power View working in Office 2013

Getting PowerPivot & Power View working in Office 2013

One of the many exciting features of Office 2013 is that PowerPivot now comes as a part of the installation & Power View is now available in the client for Excel 2013 , rather than being an post installation add-in for PowerPivot and web resident only for PowerView.  PowerPivot is still a COM add-in, but is not more tightly integrated with the product & Power View is now a COM Add-in. I upgraded to Office 2013, removing the 2010 version,…

Read More Read More

PowerPivot & Claims Based Authentication–Is there hope in SQL 2012?

PowerPivot & Claims Based Authentication–Is there hope in SQL 2012?

I promised an update on this in my previous article and it is time to share what I have learned. The issue: As many of us have painfully found, PowerPivot v1 on a Claims Based Authentication web application is not supported in SharePoint 2010.  I had a case open with Microsoft last year that had the aspirations of rectifying that situation.  We had hoped that working with the PowerPivot team (a part of the SQL Server Product team) and the…

Read More Read More

SQL Server 2012 Announcements & a new Blogger

SQL Server 2012 Announcements & a new Blogger

The big news of the day in the technology world… no, not the Blackberry outage… no, not iOS 5 being released…  the big news about SQL Server Code Name: “Denali” becoming official SQL Server 2012!  Product release is slated for the first half of 2012 (not specifically Q1 as many of us had hoped) Project Crescent has been rebranded as Power View and announced that there will be a browser based version that will work on iOS & Android devices,…

Read More Read More

Update: PowerPivot in Windows with Claims Authentication on SharePoint 2010 case

Update: PowerPivot in Windows with Claims Authentication on SharePoint 2010 case

We had a second great discussion with Lee Graber and Venky Veeraraghavan and our MS Account Team today.  They are actively working on getting a solution to allow PowerPivot to work with Windows Claims Authentication in SharePoint 2010, as I talked about in my previous post.  They are expecting to down select an approach, from 4 down to 1, by the end of the week and give us an update on what the timeline will look like.This has been a…

Read More Read More

All PowerPivot Features supported only in Classic Mode Authentication

All PowerPivot Features supported only in Classic Mode Authentication

Surprised?  I was this week as well.  I have had a case open with Microsoft since October that we have been playing with back and forth trying to figure out why automated refreshing of a PowerPivot workbook wasn’t working.We let the case go off and on for a quite a while because in the opening days we found that if we ran the PowerPivot Service Application Pool in the context of the farm admin account, that manually refreshing the data…

Read More Read More