November 2009 - Posts

• PowerPivot BI for the Cloud – Give it a REST!

  If you’re a regular reader of the Altius Community blogs, you’ll have seem an increasing amount of activity around PowerPivot (formerly Gemini) as a BI tool delivered as part of Office 2010, with significant enhancements when used in conjunction with the upcoming SQL Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010. PowerPivot We had the pleasure of hosting an event in London last week with Donald Farmer, the Microsoft BI Programme Manager, presenting his thoughts on BI and how it is evolving to meet the ever-changing needs of Enterprise-consumers. PowerPivot is a great tool to help straddle the gulf between what ‘the business’ needs in terms of access to information, familiarity in terms of how to use it etc and the IT needs around governance, control and availability. PowerPivot delivers the flexibility and power of Excel to the business user, whilst providing control and making the most of the investment in back-end quality, scalable data sources provided by IT. Cloud Computing One of the big changes (and the cause of a lot of turbulence) in the IT world at the moment is the concept of ‘Cloud Computing’. Microsoft’s model for this is ‘Software + Services’ (S+S) – identifying that a mix of on-premise and off-premise systems is an appropriate answer, enabling the economies of scale, flexibility and dynamism to be gained from Software + Services e.g. provisioning services more rapidly and cost effectively in ‘the cloud’. One of the key challenges in Business Intelligence is providing access to the right information at the right time. Doing so internally with Microsoft BI is one part of that story. Integrating cloud-based data with in-house data is a large part of the S+S model and will help deliver massive gain as the model breaks down the walls between internal and external systems and information. That’s nice, but I don’t have full S+S yet The chances are that your organisation is using some kind of Cloudware already – whether it’s website statistics monitoring, SalesForce.com for CRM, facilities management software or one of a growing army of applications that have a tight fit for the benefits of cloud computing. Many organisations are benefitting from this model, but are struggling to integrate the information they contain with internally available data – so how do you make the most of the data already in these systems? REST and PowerPivot may be the answer. PowerPivot – Give it a REST REST (Representational State Transfer – but let’s ignore how techy that sounds for now) is a web services protocol that is growing in popularity as a great (and simple) way for applications to provide a common way to interact. REST provides a formal pattern for communicating with applications in a service oriented architecture (SOA), allowing you to ‘consume services’ in a logical way rather than have to know technical details of how it is implemented. SOA is widely adopted in Cloudware / software as a service applications already as a way to ‘glue’ applications together – you can use it too! PowerPivot provides, out of the box, directly in Excel, the ability to consume REST-compliant services from anywhere, allowing non-technical users to gain access to the information within your cloud-based systems, mine it, combine it with other external (and internal) sources and use it to support business-critical decision making. Connecting to an external service is available from the simple menu in PowerPivot (allowing you to also consume data already embedded within internal Reporting Services reports right next to external ‘Other Feeds’): From there, you simply provide the address to the REST services that your Cloudware vendor provides: (In this example I’m using a publicly available data on purchase orders provided as part of Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative and the District of Columbia’s publicly available purchasing data - http://ogdi.cloudapp.net/v1/dc/PurchaseOrders/). From here PowerPivot handles the details of the queries and protocols for you, allowing you to connect live to the data and treat it as any other table of data within PowerPivot or Excel – making it very much a ‘power excel user’ feature. From here you can start to filter, slice-and-dice, aggregate, analyse and report. If you can use Pivot Tables, you’ll be up and running in minutes! Built something great? Share(Point) it With SharePoint 2010, you’ll also be able to share the PowerPivot models you’ve built with your team. Sharing & Collaborating using PowerPivot models enables them to become the one validated source of information for you and your team – delivering high-quality, connected and up-to-date, self-service BI without resorting to hundreds of versions of linked, e-mailed and out of date Excel files. Find out more If you’re interested in finding out how you can employ Microsoft BI – often using software your organisation is already licensed for – get in touch to discuss your needs and we can point you in the right direction. Matt.Quinn@altiusconsulting.com Posted Nov 23 2009, 02:18 PM by Matt Quinn with no comments Filed under: Microsoft, Excel, REST, PowerPivot Share |

• Xobni Enterprise – Bringing BI to your Inbox

  Xobni - www.xobni.com have today launched the Enterprise edition of their family of Outlook plug-in products designed to make you more efficient in the way in which you interact with one of the biggest untapped corporate data resources – your inbox! As a free outlook add-in (along with the $30 Xobni Plus edition with its enhanced features and performance) Xobni has been downloaded by over 3 Million users. It’s snowballing popularity is highlighted by Bill Gates’ decision to use Xobni as a demonstration of the power of Outlook (and Office) as a developer platform. So what’s it all about? Xobni is about ‘taking back your inbox’. Since installing it some three months ago, I’m not sure I could live without it anymore. I won’t go into detail on the out of the box features as they’re well covered in detail here: http://www.xobni.com/learnmore/ What you see with Xobni in Outlook: Where Xobni gets really interesting from a Business Intelligence & Performance Management perspective is with today’s launch of Xobni Enterprise. Xobni Enterprise delivers what users love about Xobni, whilst meeting corporate IT needs – primarily ease of management through centralised deployment and configuration; tighter control over which extensions are available and to whom (e.g. call centre users don’t get Twitter or Facebook access, but sales guys do get LinkedIn for example) and, and this is the biggy, the ability to create and deploy custom extensions. So what’s that got to do with BI? BI means many things to many people, but here at Altius we believe Businss Intelligence is about turning the reams of data within an organisation into decision-quality information that enables better decision making. When you think about it, where does most of the information you make decisions on live? Where do you go to confirm the prices agreed on a contract? Where do you look to find the white paper or product catalogue before making a purchase? The likely answer is your inbox (or one of it’s hundreds of sub-folders, calendar invites and contact cards). Given the unstructured nature of the inbox, it’s often difficult to find what you’re looking for and easy to get distracted, wasting millions of corporate hours and costing businesses an estimated $900 Billion each year in the US alone.  Xobni helps to bring order the chaos of the inbox and now, with Xobni Enterprise, we can help deliver information from corporate data systems in the same way. Xobni Enterprise enables us to extend the delivery of right time, right place information by connecting information from portal, CRM and back-office systems right into the user’s Outlook window in the context of their current conversations. By providing a context-sensitive Xobni Enterprise window into corporate systems such as SharePoint, Oracle, SAP and line-of-business applications we can support end-users’ abilities to make informed decisions quickly and effectively. The custom extensions library already comes equipped with SharePoint and SalesForce.com connectors allowing you to quickly pull additional data from those corporate silos into Outlook and position it inline with the conversation you’re having – right time, right place. In addition to the ‘out of the box’ extensions, we as a Xobni Partner, can help you create custom extensions through the Xobni Enterprise APIs to deliver any other information you require, queried based upon the context of the e-mail the user has selected. Custom Extensions in action One example integration is the delivery of Bing Maps for Enterprise (formerly Virtual Earth) as a Xobni Enterprise extension. When linked to our geographical data reporting solutions (e.g. sales data for the currently selected sales rep, or location based information as part of an asset tracking application), this could quickly allow sales managers or call centre reps to gain insight into the performance or location of the person they are in conversation with. In the screenshot below for example, we utilise the e-mail address of the current contact, query a reporting solution and deliver a customised Bing Maps for Enterprise rendering directly into Xobni, centered on the contact’s location. This could easily be overlaid with additional data – for example selecting a territory manager might deliver sales performance data for that manager across the region, rendered over the map. At a glance, the sales director is then able to put conversations with the manager into the frame of current performance.     Find out more Xobni Enterprise is hot off the press, launched only this morning at San Francisco’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. Over the coming weeks, we’re talking to dozens of IT Managers, Business users and Enterprise Architects to understand how Xobni can work for them. If you’d like to find out more, see a demo of the functionality OR if you are already loving Xobni and want to discuss a custom extension for your business or place a Xobni Enterprise order – get in touch – matt.quinn@altiusconsulting.com Press Release: http://www.xobni.com/press/11012009_enterprise.php Xobni Enterprise Product: http://www.xobni.com/enterprise Posted Nov 02 2009, 06:08 PM by Matt Quinn with no comments Filed under: Silverlight, SharePoint, BI, Xobni Share |