MS BI Conference – Day 3
Posted Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
Phew…3 days of hardcore BI geekdom come to a close. The action for today was very representative of the first two days:
Keynotes
Kurt DelBene did a nice job, along with Kristina Kerr, Senor Product Mgr. Kurt gave a pretty good, but very stock analyst\marketing\can’t-tell-you-anything preso on the future of the BI stack and integration of the office solutions to same. If you think self-service via Excel and greater integration with MOSS, you think right. However, Kurt also commented that we are only "halfway through Wave 14", so you won’t see anything for at least another year.
Kristina did a very catchy demo of Microsoft Surface as a BI UI by showing water usage data for the downtown Seattle core, mapped against Visual Earth, against temperature and time. Very cool, very 3-D. Not a single customer I work with will ever buy it. K: Come up with a self service app that lets me order and pay in a restaurant without talking to a waiter, and I think you may have a winner.
From an overall perspective, the keynotes (with the exception of Ben Stein) were the definite weak point of the conference. Little solid info, lots of marketing stuff.
Sessions
The only one I did today was Avoiding Common Mistakes in Analysis Services: Very nicely done by Craig Utley. Between his discussion around Attribute Hierarchies and Attribute Relationships, he solved 4 separate problems I have currently with customer deployments. Also, he has a great book called Business Intelligence with Microsoft Office Performance Point Server 2007
Vendor Pavilion
Today was the first day I spent time in the Vendor Pavilion and spent the entire time with Robert Sterling, VP of Partner Alliances, at Strategy Companion. SC is a great vendor of BI plug in solutions for Dynamics CRM and is one of the few that produce a truly powerful and highly integrated solution.
Hands on Lab
The balance of the day was spent in the HOL working on Performance Point Dashboards, Excel Services\MOSS, and Dynamics AX integration with SSAS. I think I set a conference record of almost 4 hours in front of the training machines, but was very impressed by the content.
Overall Review
In general, this is a good conference and worth the money, provided you look closely at the conference agenda BEFORE you sign up. If you’re a client of IBIS and customer of Microsoft, send your CIO or high level tech team combined with at least one SQL Server DBA. If you are a partner, send an architect and at least on business application (ERP or CRM) consultant. This year, only I went. Next year, we’ll probably want to take at least one more person.
Avoid the keynotes. Split the sessions up to cover maximum ground. Spend lots of time in the HOL.
Thanks for reading, folks.
Tags: BI, MOSS, MS BI Conference, PPS, SQL
Posted in Business Intelligence, Reporting
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