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Derek Comingore from BI Voyage presented an abbreviated version of his Louisville SQL Saturday presentation and demos. The technology shows a lot of promise as it fills a gap in the current Microsoft BI offerings. The technology capitalizes on much of the existing Microsoft offerings like SQL Server, SharePoint, and the widely used Excel.
It is not without its shortcomings, but with all processes and technologies that empower organizations via the use of their information, there is a responsibility to understand the trade-offs and considerations.
PowerPivot appears to be flexible and have different uses depending on the type and size of the organization.
- I can quickly see it has an enormous potential as a model or prototype for understanding the ROI that can be achieved by implementing traditional BI, Enterprise Data Warehousing, or Datamarts.
- It has the ability to provide options for organizations that don't have the resources to put traditional BI in place, but want to capitalize some of the advantages that it can provide.
- It can be a great communication tool to demonstrate and refine the type of reports/analysis that the business consumers would like added to the formal EDW/BI.
- It can be used to supplement and extend the information from the formal IT BI with other non-ERP data like employee satisfaction surveys/ 360 degree reviews, etc.
New late breaking information from Derek, the morning after the presentation:
SharePoint & Office 2010 Betas became available as of yesterday for MSDN & TechNet subscribers. Also, PowerPivot for Excel (client) CTP3 is to become available as of today, Nov 18, 2009, expected to be available at www.powerpivot.com .
Thus, to create a single-machine environment I recommend the following configuration (physical or virtual machine):
- Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 with Web & Application Server Roles
- SharePoint Server 2010 x64
- SQL Server 2008R2 November CTP (allready released http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2Downloads.aspx ). Configure Analysis Services for SharePoint Integrated Mode
- Office Client Suite 2010 Beta x64
- PowerPivot CTP3 when available today
This will create an end-to-end SQL Server PowerPivot Suite for evaluation.
Giveaways were two USB Drives fromSQLServerPedia and Quest Software , two books - Collective Intelligence by O'Reilly and SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services by Microsoft Press, and four @BrentO TweetSQL T-shirts from Quest Software.
During the networking part of the meeting Clifford Clarke made us aware of the Professional Connections of Northeast Indiana group that meets on Wednesdays to assist executives in their career transitions.
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