If your company runs SAP, chances are the picture below represents your environment pretty well The black colors represent the existing investments/business processes and the size of the bubbles represents the effort/investment $$$. Your company has made a very large investment in the SAP back-end (ERP, BW, etc.) which is represented by a large black circle … Continue reading SAP vs. Microsoft, Information Assets vs. End User Experience positioning
Author: Business Intelligist
SAP Visual Intelligence vs. Microsoft PowerPivot and PowerView
In this post I will review the latest version of SAP Visual Intelligence – 1.08 – and see how it stacks up against the Microsoft self-service BI tools, Excel, PowerPivot and PowerView. In the initial release, Visual Intelligence only supported SAP Hana, but in its latest iteration few other data sources are supported: CSV File … Continue reading SAP Visual Intelligence vs. Microsoft PowerPivot and PowerView
How to think strategic about Business Intelligence
Many people reach out to me asking for advice in helping them evaluate various BI platforms for their companies. In my mind I am obviously the wrong guy to ask as I am not shy to admit my fairly heavy bias towards Microsoft. However, over the course of the last twenty years, I have been exposed … Continue reading How to think strategic about Business Intelligence
Customizing PowerView in PowerPoint
Although "customizing" may be too strong of a word, there are few things that we can tweak to improve the look and feel of PowerView slides that had just been exported from SharePoint. The first thing to do after the fresh export is to adjust the size of the exported image. For some reason as … Continue reading Customizing PowerView in PowerPoint
Microsoft BI ranks highest in ability to execute by Gartner
Microsoft once again is ranked the highest in its ability to execute by Gartner in its magic quadrant for Business Intelligence. The report is pretty long and boring, but if I were distill it down to a few salient points, I would choose the following: Companies see a dramatic improvement in BI capabilities going from … Continue reading Microsoft BI ranks highest in ability to execute by Gartner
Some comments on the CTP of the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 With PowerView For Multidimensional Models
I have had a pretty frustrating experience with it so far. I think that the only way get it to work is to have it deployed as a SSRS Service Application inside SharePoint and then configure PowerView. In other words, if you are planning to install a multidemensional instance of the CTP, install your OLAP cube … Continue reading Some comments on the CTP of the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 With PowerView For Multidimensional Models
Microsoft SQL Server 2012 With PowerView For Multidimensional Models is available in CTP
Microsoft demonstrated PowerView on top of the Multidimensional model in Analysis Services several weeks ago at SQL PASS and now the CTP version of the product is available here. There are two pieces of new functionality delivered with this CTP: Update for Analysis Services engine to allow DAX support for Multidimensional models Update for the … Continue reading Microsoft SQL Server 2012 With PowerView For Multidimensional Models is available in CTP
SAP Hana vs Microsoft SQL Server, the war is on…
and the Germans are making the first move... I have written two posts about Hana vs. xVelocity (Part I and Part II) making the basic point that there is nothing truly visionary or revolutionary in SAP Hana from the technology perspective and that a customer can get all the benefits (or rather alleged benefits as … Continue reading SAP Hana vs Microsoft SQL Server, the war is on…
PowerView Feature Comparisons
PowerView experience will be delivered across several Microsoft products: Excel (fat client) Excel Services (SharePoint) SharePoint – SQL Edition Office 365 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 … Continue reading PowerView Feature Comparisons
Apps for Office, specifically Office 2013
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 … Continue reading Apps for Office, specifically Office 2013
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