Business Intelligence "lights up" with Office SharePoint 2007 was the topic.

Sydney SQL Server User Group meeting on Tuesday 1st August 2006

This must have been their most packed session to date!
Possibly 100 people there and the lecturette was packed!

There was no pizza this time, instead they had sub-way or some similar type of rolls
– These weren’t too bad but how long will the healthy food keep coming?

One event coming up is SQL Code camp October 7th and 8th in Wagga Wagga at the Charles Sturt Uni.
This is funded by Microsoft but accommodation and food is up to you.
http://www.sqldownunder.com/CodeCamp/tabid/53/Default.aspx

Grant stepped us through using Excel 2007 and how it works nicely with Excel services.

Microsoft appears to be gearing Excel 2007 as the new tool to extract and view your database/cube information.
And it has a lot more smarts built in than the earlier versions of excel with the cube add-ons etc.

Also the new SharePoint ties in all your business intelligence a lot better and easier than ever before!
There is going to be a major stampede when this product is released for this aspect alone.

I liked the one point grant raised but Business intelligence – You can make good decisions, wrong decisions and bad decisions, but what is the difference between a wrong decision and a bad decision? The answer was a bad decision is made when you haven’t got enough information!

The main point here is that some organisations may have a few people running office 2007 just so they can publish the “server based” excel workbooks etc.
Others can read and input parameters to generate different results via a web browser interface.
So this might be a great way to publish excel like reports with charts and other interactive features to key groups of users!

The KPI options in SharePoint lists look cool and will probably be demonstrated over and over again.
There was also the bars inside a columns with different colours based on the values using some standard deviation formula to show more reddish the lower end and more greenish the upper end.

One trick with Analysis services is not to include fields that you won’t need. It is too easy to select everything from all your tables etc.
Fields like phone numbers and names are probably only important when you drill down, and these should be excluded from the cubes and be shown on drill through via a SQL query rather than via the cube.

Another nice to have feature was the ability to drill down in the same column. Means the columns to the right with the key values don’t get pushed off your screen to the right.

The standard dashboard template was great and was shown linking to an excel services file as it was difficult to find and set the right permissions to analysis services etc.

The new SharePoint Server and SQL Server 2005 each have a very tight security to deploy and will require knowledgeable people to configure anything and everything as access is turned off for just about everything.

Regards,

Tom Bizannes (B.Business,MCP)
Microsoft Certified Professional
(Microsoft SQL Server Database Administration and Design)
MacroView Business Technology
http://www.macroview.com.au
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner
Phone: 61 2 9249 2700 Fax: 61 2 9279 4111
"Solutions in SharePoint and Office"
2005 Winner - MSD2D Readers Choice award - Document Management