The second day’s keynote is by Ted Kummert and focuses on BI.

This keynote is in one of the smaller auditoriums, which makes sense as only a portion of the attendees are interested in BI. However there are a fair number of BI people in the conference that have a regular pass and aren’t allowed in. Apparently there’s an overflow room, but I found a number of people waiting in line for 5-10 minutes to get in, only to be turned away at the door because they didn’t have the BI, yellow bordered badge.

Ted runs the business platform division, which includes SQL Server, and the application server technologies.

Every day businesses are asking questions about their business. That’s true, they are always looking for more insight, more data to support or debunk a position. The dream of BI, making business more efficient, able to more forward, allowing people to make better decisions, that’s something we all want. I know that people at Microsoft want to make that owrk better, and they have, but there is also a need for us in IT to learn enough to effectively apply these technologies.

The keynote looks back at the last BI conference, before all the BI enhancements were added and released in SQL Server 2008 R2. No committments to future released, but a look forward is coming.

A slide showing that 20% of the end users have BI tools to use, and 80% do not have tools. It’s a similar story, and MS is looking to try and get more end user BI, self-service BI, to that 80%. BI for Everyone, for 100%, is the vision for MS.

A nice admission that BI is too hard Too much terminology and technology to learn. I agree with that. BI is hard. So that the idea is to make BI more familiar, using familiar tools. That’s PowerPivot, and I agree with that move. I’ve written about it, and if you haven’t seen it, check it out.

Collaboration is important, and that includes sharing BI reports, documents, etc. This is primarily with Sharepoint integration from MS.

There is a note that BI for Everyone means that we have to have managed data. Not data in the wild, in Access, Excel, but in environments managed by IT. So it’s not a look to get fewer DBAs, but rather have DBAs become more managers of data, but allowing end users to access this data with new tools, with less IT involvement in the end user consumption.

Column oriented, in memory store. That’s what PowerPivot is, and it’s one of the few times that I’ve heard someone actually note that.

Moving the Excel sheets with Powerpivot into Sharepoint means that IT can manage it. That’s a good thing, so you might want to consider adding some Sharepoint skills. This allows the IT group to back up, and secure, the data that end users are actually compiling, and working with.

Bi for everyone, sold as: Office 2010, Sharepoint 2010, SQL Server 2010. A great way for MS to sell more licenses, multiple products. Good business strategy, and it means that you’ll need to upgrade Office to get end users working. Tell system admins to get prepped for that, skill and budget-wise.

Michael Tejedor doing a demo. Sharepoint 2010, searching, and then finding reports stored in Excel sheets. Looking at the data sources, SQL Azure is listed along with many that you expect to see. There are also sources for getting data from SSRS Reports, which is often where someone finds some data they want to scrape out.

There is an extension to the Excel expression language for Powerpivot, DAX. There are also “social” additions to the collaborative items in Sharepoint. It’s a good marketing move, allowing people to do things like “Tag” or “comment” on a document at a high level, as opposed to a particular cell. you can even “rate” documents, which is something that I’d wonder if people used.

There are more settings, in addition to things like permissions. You can set data refresh intervals, and workflows.  There are compliance features built in as well, allowing companies to better manage data and ensure it is not being released in violation of regulartory requirements. This is a good check outside of security

There are good manageability features as well for IT, allowing you to see aggregate activity for the system as well as for individual reports, see the usage of queries, documents, etc. With the farms being built, this should allow you to capacity plan better than in the past.

You can also see from where data is coming, which can allow you to find out if the sources of data are being overloaded, and perhaps allow you to denormalize, or partition out data sets that are important to end users.

A customer story from CareGroup Healthcare. It’s a guy that was featured a bit last year at the BI conference at the PASS Summit. I had lunch with him, and he does like Microsoft technology. However that might be because he’s a featured customer, and perhaps he gets some benefits. He’s showing off some Powerpivot reports that I think he showed last year, which allow his end users to build reports that they need without coming to IT.