It’s another Saturday, must be time for another speaking engagement. Today I’m in Huntsville Alabama speaking at their SharePoint Saturday. Now you may wonder what a SQL BI guy is doing at a SharePoint event. There are two kinds of BI professionals in the world, those who are currently working with SharePoint and those who will be working with SharePoint. I believe the converse could also be said for SharePoint people. There those who are currently hosting BI solutions, and those who will be hosting BI solutions. It’s important then, that SharePoint professionals have a clear understanding of what business intelligence is, including all the terms that get used in the BI world. In addition SharePoint 2010 contains features to support a new tool called PowerPivot. Understanding what a PowerPivot workbook is, and how their customers will be using it will give SharePoint professionals better understanding of how to host PowerPivot content.
My first session of the day is entitled “Off and Running With PowerPivot for Excel 2010”. In this session I’ll be giving an overview of PowerPivot, then we’ll be looking at how to import and manipulate data within Excel. This presentation is demo heavy but there are a few slides which can be downloaded from this link.
In my second presentation we’ll dig into the guts of data warehousing and business intelligence. Business Intelligence has its own vocabulary, during the session the audience will learn all the buzzwords around BI and dig into the data warehouse to see how these terms are implemented. This particular presentation is a slide heavy deck, unlike my previous session there is little in the way of demonstrations. We’ll briefly touch on SharePoint, understand though that this presentation centered largely around understanding what BI is so you’ll understand what your SharePoint system is being used for. The slides are available from this link.
If you are reading this after the fact, then let me thank you for coming to my presentations. I hope you found them useful, please don’t hesitate to contact me if I can be of further assistance.
Arcane Code 