Author Archives: Business Intelligist

PowerView Feature Comparisons

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PowerView experience will be delivered across several Microsoft products:

  1. Excel (fat client)
  2. Excel Services (SharePoint)
  3. SharePoint – SQL Edition
  4. Office 365
  5. PowerPoint

I get a lot of questions as to what features are supported across all these deployment scenarios. Luckily Microsoft shared a slide that I will attempt to reproduce here that explains what features work where and how.

Feature

Excel

Excel Services

SharePoint/SQL

Office 365
All visualizations

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes
Power View Authoring

Yes

No

Yes

No
Cross Visualization Interactivity

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes
External Images

Yes, anonymous

Yes, anonymous

Yes

Yes
Workbook or model size

Max Workbook Size

AS Limits

AS Limits

10MB
Export to PowerPoint

No

No

Yes

No
Reorder Power View views

No

No

Yes

No
Connecting to multidimensional UDM

No

No

Yes

No
Offline Mode

Yes

No

No

No
Multiple External Models

Yes

Yes

No

Yes
Report Zoom

No

Browser Zoom

Browser Zoom

Browser Zoom
Reading and Presentation mode

No

No

Yes

No
Windows RT support

No

No

No

No
Windows 8 Pro support

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

There are several interesting points to make here.

  1. Microsoft thinks of “Export to PowerPoint” as a feature as opposed to thinking of PowerPoint as another environment for Power View like Excel even though the PowerPoint does support the authoring capability as it is outlined here
  2. There seems to be some fragmentation in several important features such as ability to support multidimensional models and multiple external models
  3. No Windows RT support is very annoying (given the fact that RT is happily supporting Flash but not Microsoft own Silverlight). I understand (although do not agree with) that Microsoft had to scale down the RT functionality in order to please its hardware partners; however, I do not understand why I do not even have an option to BUY the missing functionality such as Silverlight, Outlook, etc. (or rather the entire Office Professional) for Windows RT. As I mentioned before, I love the Surface from the hardware perspective, however, I believe that I should be able to have an option to upgrade my user experience to the full featured product for additional $$$ if I have to

Apps for Office, specifically Office 2013

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Those who have been looking for new features in Microsoft Office 2013 have probably found the new Insert->Apps for Office button on the Ribbon. I have played around with these a little bit and have a few things to report.

To get an idea of what Apps for Office are available, please check out this link. I was a little confused after I looked at the app selection the first time, so I did some digging around to understand what exactly an App for Office is. At the high level one can define an App for Office as a piece of JavaScript/HTML logic that is rendered inside an office document and can interact with the content of the document. So, for example, a Gauge App can be configured to take input from an Excel cell and to show that value in a gauge, which is pretty cool since Excel does not natively support gauges.

In and of itself, this new feature maybe cool but not truly remarkable, what makes it remarkable, however, is ability now post this visualization as a part of the overall dashboard to SharePoint. SharePoint 2013 can now be configured to support applications so that if an end user embeds a gauge or a map in his or her Excel workbook, SharePoint will be able to render it in Excel Services just as a regular chart or control. I have actually been able to configure that feature in SharePoint 2013, post an Excel spreadsheet with a gauge in it and see it render as a web page – very impressive!

So far, I have played around with the Gauge, Heat Map and Bing map Apps for Office and for the most parts found them to be very promising. I am having a bit of an issue with stability as for some reason the Gauge control for example does not always “Start” when I try to insert it in my Excel worksheet. My gut feeling is that the issue is related to the way these Apps are linked to my Windows accounts, and I have several that I use for different purposes, so this is something I will be chasing down in the next few days.

This is a pretty promising new feature as it now allows us to extend the existing office functionality using a pretty standard set of web technologies. Please follow this link for additional information.

Microsoft makes big announcements at SQL PASS

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I will have a more detailed write-up of everything later but still wanted to give a quick summary of the new announcements:

  1. Updateable Column store – Project Hekaton will be released in the next major release of SQL Server and will allow us create updateable clustered column store indexes. This is huge, 20-50 performance increases without any changes to the existing hardware and/or applications
  2. SQL Server SP1 is released – primary focus is to support the new BI features in Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013
  3. The new version of PDW will be released in H1 of 2013 with support for Hadoop and updateable column store, read whatever you will in that date…
  4. PowerView was shown to support OLAP cubes… More details on that will be released tomorrow

A quick note on Surface RT battery life

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Just wanted to write a quick note about my first day of using Surface at work.. I used it extensively throughout the whole day, lots of internet browsing, a few Lync meetings, heavy emails.

As of right now, the battery is at 58% without me charging it for the entire day.  In fact I had to leave the charger at home as I knew I would not be able fight the urge to use it.

Other then a few hiccups with Lync when it came to viewing someone else’s presentation, the performance was rock solid; I have to say, I am getting more and more impressed.  You can read more about the Surface in my reveiw Part I and Part II.

The bottom line is that those who have tried to use iPad for work and got frustrated with it (as everyone would) should definitely look no further.  Surface delivers a full day worth reach content creation and consumption experience.

Surface RT review, part II

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I was a little surprised to see how much traffic was generated by my original post.  I decided that, it would be a good idea to follow up with a review focused on the device itself.

My first experience with Windows 8 came from Samsung Series 9 tablet.  I generally liked the tablet although it was a little too big and too thick and the battery life was too short to really make it a viable option to be my mobile office alternative.  So when I evaluate Surface RT I do it in the context of two products, iPad (for obvious reasons)and Samsung Series 9 tablet.

Hardware-wise, the Surface is pretty close to perfect (at least for me) with respect to size and other specs.  It’s just big enough to make the screen acceptable to author Word documents and build PowerPoint decks (this review is written entirely on Microsoft Word in the Surface RT), but it is also small enough to just throw in the bag and go get a cup of coffee.  I would not mind if it was a bit lighter, but again, size-wise, I am pretty happy with it.

The biggest difference from the iPad is the fact that the Surface is legitimately a very viable option for content creation.  I do BI for living and as it is probably apparent from my original post, the Surface RT is not there yet to replace my trusted laptop, however, for the vast majority of people who are casual users of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, Surface will work just fine.  I am still trying to get used to the Space bar, and of course the Touch Cover keyboard has a completely different feel from a traditional keyboard, but I would say that overall it’s very usable…just wish that Space Bar was cooperating a little bit better with me :) …

I connected a USB Mouse to the Surface RT just to see if it would work and it did just fine.  The Touch Cover track pad works fine, it’s just a little small, but it does support some gestures, but no track pad (and I don’t care what Apple fanatics say about their track pads) will be as good as a good mouse.

The screen resolution is OK for the size, probably it is simply good if you want to use it for work, but when I am laying in bed and using it to browse internet I sometimes wish that the resolution was a little higher, but for work related activities, higher resolution would probably make screen a little hard to read, so I think that the resolution is probably where it needs to be for this form factor.

The screen works great outside, just need to crank up the brightness a little bit.  The cameras suck for taking pictures, but realistically, I would never use the Surface to take pictures.  Although, I would expect better quality than what we get… Video chat quality is good, no complains there.

The biggest impression that the Surface has made on me thus far is the battery life.  It is very good.  I am normally paranoid to pack a charger or two for all my electronic devices even if I am leaving my office or home for just a few hours.  I have a feeling I won’t be needing to worry about that much with the Surface.  Surface lasts all day and what’s even more impressive, it charges very quickly.  When I saw the charger first I thought “Hmmm, this thing is a little chunky”, I guess being anchored to a size of a phone charger, but even though the charger is a little bigger than the one I use for my phone, I am happy with the trade off since it charges the Surface so quickly.

So compared to the iPad the product really shines as it allows me to actually get some work done where an iPad or an Android tablet eventually gets relegated to just basically browsing the internet and watching movies.  Compared to the Samsung Series 9 tablet running Windows 8, the biggest gain is the independence from the outlet.  I will be the first to admit that the Samsung tablet is a lot more capable device with respect to being able to run legacy apps, but I will also have to admit that given the form factor limitations, I did not really use all those legacy apps much anyway, but again, it would be awesome if I could.

So, is the Surface a great device? It surely is.  The only real shortcoming today is an incomplete App Store, but I would expect that go get better in the next few weeks.  To someone who has no significant investments in either Apple or Google ecosystems, buying this device should be a no brainer.  Those who are heavily invested in Xbox are also good candidates to be a perfect fit for a target audience.  Those who use their iPads for work today should definitely give them to their parents or toddlers, as they will be able to do so much more with Surface than iPad without really any tradeoffs with respect to quality of content consumption.

The only people who have no real reasons to switch are those with significant investment in the competing ecosystems (and it’s a huge, huge number of people indeed).

The other category of people who are likely to be underwhelmed are power users like me.  Those who need advanced content creation capabilities and ability to run resource intensive and/or legacy applications should not consider the Surface as a viable option.

I am very frustrated that today Surface is not a great device to consume certain Microsoft BI content such as PowerView, but hopefully that will be addressed soon, and that aside, I have to admit that I am liking my Surface more and more everyday, and I am also getting more dependent on it every day which I guess is not really a bad thing :)

 

 

No material differences with respect to BI found between the RTM and Preview versions of Microsoft Office 2013

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Having gone through the RTM version of Microsoft Office 2013 RTM I cannot find any material differences from the Preview version. The two major (although not really feature related) differences are speed and stability (both revised significantly upwards).

Microsoft Surface RT review, sort of in a context of Microsoft BI

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First, I have to explain why I am writing this review when so many websites have already covered the product – the only thing that I will cover that others haven’t is what features of Microsoft BI stack run on Surface and what don’t.

Let’s get through the bad stuff first. I don’t know if I should blame Microsoft for it or not, but somehow I had very high expectations for this device. Unfortunately, framing Surface as a work laptop replacement turned out to be a big mistake. Here are the details:

  1. Office:
    1. The Surface comes with the Office 2013 Preview preinstalled, however, after I went to the Control Panel and ran Windows Update, my version of office got upgraded to the retail version of the product. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this version of office supports neither PowerPivot nor PowerView. I can live with a lack of support for macros, but in this day and age, no PowerView is bad news since I expect that most of the new BI content will favor that technology over the more traditional pivot tables and charts
    2. Cube value functions are available, which is very exciting. There is still an option to create connections to Analysis Services, although I have not yet been able to test it out. Since there is no concept of domains and no ability to install a VPN client, I am still not clear how I would physically accomplish this (one workaround that may help is accessing the cube via a Data Pump), but what’s encouraging is that at least some BI features are available.
    3. Standard set of PivotCharts is still available
    4. There appears that out of the box, Excel has drivers to connect to SQL Server, Analysis Services and Oracle (!), again, this is something.
    5. No Add-ins support means that it is impossible to have MDS, PowerPivot and Data Mining features enabled
    6. SharePoint – first I wrote that it did not work, because I tried to use “Other Web Locations” option and got a bunch complaints about SilverLight (more on that later) and something about ActiveX not supported. However, after I selected “Computer” options and typed in the URL for a SharePoint site, I was able to log in and open an Excel file. This is very encouraging, although I am not getting to specify Excel Service options when I try to save the file back to SharePoint
    7. QuickExplore option is not available, this sucks.
    8. All of the now standard OLAP tools features are available, including writeback support and ability to create sets and calculated members, that is actually awesome
  2. SilverLight
    1. This is the biggest disappointment so far. I mean, yes it sucks not to have the new BI features available, but, SilverLight should have been there. It’s one thing to not be able to create PowerView reports (which obviously needs Silverlight), but it’s another not to be able to vew Powerview report from my SharePoint site… I was actually quite upset about that, this is almost a deal breaker for me. In fact I got so upset over this yesterday that I pretty much decided to return the Surface in the morning after I just bought it yesterday. Luckily, I decided to give it another chance today, but more on that later.
  3. SharePoint
    1. This is another piece of bad news for somebody who is trying to consume the BI related content using Surface as a touch only device. The experience for everything that requires Silverlight (Self Service Alerts in SSRS) or right click (Interacting with Performance Point reports) is downright maddening.

In short, generally speaking with few exceptions of occasional brilliance the Surface RT today is not a good choice to consume Microsoft BI content.

Now that I have gotten that out of the way, let me tell you why I decided not to return my Surface and am actually kida growing found of it.

The first thing that turned the tide was installing Lync. The version of Office that is bundled with the Surface has neither Lync nor Outlook. However I was able to download Lync from the Store and get it to work relatively quickly. Going through that exercise made me realize a few things. First and foremost, the Surface is not a laptop, therefore, expecting the legacy features to work simply does not make any sense. The right way to think about it is not in terms of what it does not do, but rather what and how it does what it in fact can do.

With respect to hardware I have to say that Surface is simply awesome. I will be the first to agree that it is a little bit on a heavy side and screen resolution could be improved. However, all of my negative experiences with the product were squarely on the software side. I am hardly the kind of the user that this product was meant to excite and delight, but the software features shortcomings aside, I have to admit I am excited and delighted with non-work related experience.

The TouchCover is amazing… I have written this review entirely on it. It is not anywhere close to the feel of a good traditional keyboard, but I have to say that the touch keyboard is completely usable. I am still struggling with the Space bar a little bit, but other than that I am typing on it almost as fast as I would on my office keyboard (and I am a very fast typist).. Microsoft says that it takes a few days to really get used to it, but I have to say that having done about an hour or so, I am sold, Surface is completely acceptable as a content creation device at least for typing. The arrow keys are also usable.

The mouse pad on the Touch Cover is also not bad. I think that having a touch screen along with a touch pad will take a little bit of getting used to but overall, I have to say that as long as the content can be rendered by Surface (remember Silverlight?) it does a very good job consuming it, definitely, runs circles around iPad.

So, it had to come out at some point I guess, and it just did. How does Surface compare to iPad? Well that’s actually very easy, all of the things that made me upset about the Surface are the same things that do not work on the iPad as well. The Surface even with all its software shortcomings literally runs circles around iPad with respect to content creation capabilities. The obvious issues is not having some of the key apps available in the Store and not all available apps run on the RT version of windows 8 (Google Search for example is not yet available on RT) but I don’t think anybody doubts this problem will go away very soon.

So to summarize, I think the Surface will find its place in my long list of gadgets that I use on a daily basis.

Forrester Releases “Self-Service Business Intelligence Platforms” report, Microsoft identified as leader

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Well, a leader and not the leader, although Microsoft BI stack is definitely ranked very high by Forrester.  Please follow this link to read the report. This is probably a little bit of old news, since the report was release in June and updated in the middle of July, but I figured it be a good to mention it anyway.  The report exhibits occasional flashes of brilliance, for example, stating that “80% of all BI requirements should be carried out by the business users themselves”, although I find the Vendor Profiles section to be quite humours as it feels like the content was pretty much cut and pasted from the respective vendors’ websites.

I find it interesting that neither Oracle nor MicroStrategy made the Leaders wave, given the fact that they dominated the Gartner’s BI quadrant for 2012.  This Forrester research was limited to the PowerView v1 released with SQL Server 2012 and since PowerView v2 that is now available in the Preview versions of Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 is significantly more robust, I cannot wait to see what Gartner’s BI quadrant will look like 2013.

Slew of important SQL Server announcements is expected at SQL Pass conference in Seattle this year

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Microsoft is expected to make a number of very important
announcements at the upcoming SQL Pass conference in Seattle… If you are on the fence about attending it this year, I would definitely recommend attending this event.

A few words on Tim Cook’s “Letter from Tim Cook on Maps”

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Today, Apple has come out with yet another PR jewel. I can’t resist and have to almost go through it sentence by sentence. It’s that good.

First, Tim says that Apple strives “to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers”, then “With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment”. Only two sentences into it but the brilliance is already shining through. Note how he does not say that the new Maps are bad, they are just short of being “best experience possible” and if you think about it, what product ever isn’t?

“We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better” Again, he is extremely sorry for “the frustration”, not for a delivering a bad product. This is where I just have to point out that Apple had no reasons to jam a half backed Map offering that it cobbled together in a hurry as it had at least one more year left in its contract with Google, so it had plenty of time to get it right and not frustrate its customer if it really cared to.

So how does Timmy explain that rush decision? Well, let’s keep reading on “We launched Maps initially with the first version of iOS. As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with even better Maps including features such as turn-by-turn directions, voice integration, Flyover and vector-based maps. In order to do this, we had to create a new version of Maps from the ground up.” He is clearly not giving Google any credit for the “initial” version of Maps, and really does not explain why they had to replace a product that basically worked, with something that didn’t.

Now, for some customary chest pounding “There are already more than 100 million iOS devices using the new Apple Maps, with more and more joining us every day. In just over a week, iOS users with the new Maps have already searched for nearly half a billion locations”. I really think this is done in a very poor taste… If you say you are sorry, then just say you are sorry, it’s like saying, sorry, I never paid you back but I had a total blast with that money in Las Vegas.

Then, moving on to the most ridiculous and unsubstantiated statement of the day “The more our customers use our Maps the better it will get and we greatly appreciate all of the feedback we have received from you.” I am not a maptologist but I suspect that the reason Google maps are great is because it employs thousands of people in its Map division (unlike Apple that employs fraction of that number) and it’s equipped with hundreds of Google Vans that are zipping around collecting data. Sorry, but the more you use it the better you get argument sounds a little silly to me.

Well, next paragraph is another gem “While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app.” While I find it humorous that the first suggested alternative was Microsoft’s product, you kind of have to ask yourself, why would Apple not make Google maps available alongside the new Apple Maps and let customers chose whichever product they like. But “Choice” is a cancer world in Apple echo system, which is why Apple customers almost never have one.

Let’s keep on keeping on though, the letter is almost over and we have not contradicted ourselves quite yet, actually I think the next sentence may do just that “Everything we do at Apple is aimed at making our products the best in the world”, well clearly not, or you would not have to have written this letter to begin with. And by the way, for somebody who is so driven to be the best one can be, there is still nothing in the letter that explains why Apple made the decision to deliver a suboptimal product to its customers and unfortunately “We know that you expect that from us, and we will keep working non-stop until Maps lives up to the same incredibly high standard” does not shed any more light on this arrogant decision than the rest of the letter.

All in all, a brilliant way of saying sorry, without admitting doing anything wrong…