It's been an interestng week here at the Microsoft BI Conference in Seattle and a first for me happened this morning. I was going over to the Steve Ballmer keynote and I got told "press" wasn't allowed in the session. So a young lady picked me out of the stream of people and turned me away.

I wasn't terribly thrilled to see Ballmer, but now I'm intrigued to know what he has to say. I can't really imagine what he wants to put out there that they'd want to keep from the press, but who knows.

It's been an interesting week and there are a couple of things that I take away from this conference. First that BI is mostly reporting. It's a way of letting users move around, drill into, customize, quickly change, etc. their reports, but it's mostly about getting timely reports to someone so they can make a more informed (and hopefully better) decision.

The second is that the business buy-in and work with the BI team is as critical as the technical skills. Having a big supported and lots of business resources is important to a successful project, and I was interested to see how much focus there was this week on the business side of BI.