BrustBlog

A BI Star is Born: PowerPivot Will Receive Immediate Multi-Vendor Support

PowerPivot is the newly announced name for Microsoft’s (not yet released) self-service analytics product, formerly code-named “Gemini.”  PowerPivot brings the power of OLAP analytics to end-users, by allowing them to create their own data models, drawing from conventional data warehouses as well as flat files, spreadsheets, and even data feeds and reports.  It then allows for sophisticated drill-down analysis in Excel 2010 itself which will feature a new “Slicer” element in its user interface, essentially allowing for easy dimensional filtering.

That’s cool enough on its own, but PowerPivot also allows for such Excel-based BI solutions to be published to SharePoint and shared amongst colleagues, who can work with the model, interactively, in the browser, care of SharePoint 2010’s Excel Services facility.  The creator of the solution can even configure scheduled data refreshes to prevent the solution’s data from becoming stale and obsolete (and that’s an issue with almost all “spreadmart” solutions). All of this allows spreadsheet solutions to be shared, but prevents users from creating their own private version of the data (another common spreadmart pitfall), because the spreadsheet is stored centrally and is, effectively, read only.

But there’s a hidden gem in all of this: when the PowerPivot solution is published to SharePoint, it becomes, in effect, a SQL Server Analysis Services cube.  That’s because the engine servicing the queries and drill downs on the server-side is a specialized version of Analysis Services, premised on a new column-oriented in-memory storage technology.  Any client tool capable of talking to Analysis Services, or any server capable of using Analysis Services as a data source, will be able to do likewise with PowerPivot.

That’s not just versatile, that’s downright ingenious.  Because a number of third parties make Analysis Services client tools.  And even more important, a number of Microsoft’s BI marketplace competitors work with Analysis Services, and therefore will work with PowerPivot, too.  Specifically, IBM/Cognos, Oracle/Hyperion, SAP/Business Objects, Microstrategy, Information Builders and Tableu will all work with server-side PowerPivot solutions once the product is released.  That list represents virtually every major commercial BI vendor, with the notable exception of QlikTech, whose QlikView product PowerPivot will compete against most directly.

The fact that PowerPivot will work with competitors’ tools, and the fact that it’s based on Excel and SharePoint, which many non-MS BI shops use anyway, could make for huge early adoption of the product.  It could also mean that the self-service BI phenomenon could catch on in a big way and prove to be disruptive across the industry, rather than exclusively within the realm of Microsoft’s BI customers.  I’m not sure if this “inherited” industry support was an intended consequence by Microsoft or an unintended one, but it doesn’t really matter.  What does matter is that Microsoft will be empowering a number of other companies’ customers by lowering their barrier of entry to BI.  Insightful.  Indeed.

posted @ Thursday, October 29, 2009 10:39 PM | Feedback (0) |

Win7 vs. Vista: It’s a Thin Line Between Love and Hate

Windows Vista is the OS everyone loved to hate.  Its replacement by Windows 7 is welcomed by just about everyone, and the initial reviews are excellent.  Thank goodness.  But let’s not let this go unanalyzed.  “Beasta” is dead, but a post mortem is necessary.

Let’s be factual about matters: when run on a decent PC (by late-2006 standards), that was designed for it, with the OS and all drivers pre-installed, Vista ran just fine, especially the 64-bit version.  Yes, Vista used a lot of memory and CPU.  Yes, file copy operations were slow before SP2.  User Account Control prompts were burdensome and annoying (and sometimes there was a longish pause between screen blackout and prompt pop-up).  And I never enjoyed the game of Windows Explorer roulette, wherein the particular view an Explorer window might display when opened was unknown.  Especially since the odds of winning seemed to favor the house, and quite heavily.  Vista had its flakey factor; no question.

But, I’ll say it again: on the right hardware, Vista ran fine.  Is “fine” (and flakey) good enough to succeed in  market where everyone thought XP was already quite good?  Well, no, it’s not. And when you add the mishaps encountered in running Vista as an upgrade on older hardware designed for XP, it’s no wonder the OS became a laughing stock.  But the fact remains that much of the hateful criticism hurled at Vista was unfounded.  It’s fine to say you didn’t like Vista.  It’s quite another to say it was horrible.

This is especially true given that many of the same people who derided Vista, and who passionately proclaimed the vast superiority of the Mac OS over it, are now singing the praises of Windows 7, utterly abandoning their zealous anti-Windows rhetoric reserved for the last release.  Yes, Windows 7 runs great on old machines and Netbooks.  It looks nice, and things like the taskbar and jump lists are good productivity features.  The UAC prompts are less obtrusive, Libraries are helpful and the media features are neat.  The pre-beta of Windows 7 seemed to run more stably that the original RTM release of Vista.  The product team was very well-run.  OEMs were better-managed and the quality of their drivers at launch was far superior than for Vista.  Having 8 million beta testers didn’t hurt either. 

Windows 7’s development was exemplary.  No argument. But this still doesn’t explain the exuberance around Windows 7 by some of its predecessor’s most virulent detractors.  In fact, with apologies to Alan Greenspan, we might call the exuberance quite irrational.

Does anyone remember the “Mojave Experiment?”  This was a stealth market research effort by Microsoft wherein random PC users were shown what (they were told) was a new version of Windows code-named Mojave. But they were, in fact, just running Vista.  That notwithstanding, the overwhelming feedback from participants was positive.  Microsoft thought this outcome was striking, significant, and even somewhat humorous.  Tech wonks everywhere thought the campaign was carried out in bad taste and proved nothing.

If at first you don’t succeed…reconfigure your campaign.  I see Windows 7 as Stage II of the Mojave experiment.  The new OS is built on the same codebase as Vista…but that code has been refined, the process around it was much better controlled and the fit and finish of the OS is nearly flawless. 

That’s probably not unlike the original Mojave experiment’s circumstances: I am certain the machines used in Mojave sessions were beefy, with fully compatible drivers, optimized configurations, lots of RAM and sufficient hard disk.  So the OS ran well.  And the people showing it were able to highlight its advances over Windows XP. We’re all Mojave 2.0 users now.  But we’re viewing it in a different light than we did Mojave 1.0. 

I don’t think that’s surprising.  People were ready to like Windows again, they desperately wanted a clean slate, and so they got it.  But, make no mistake, they’re judging Windows 7 under a different standard than they did Vista…a double standard.  Microsoft should learn that errors in execution will subject it  to such double standards and negative perceptions in general; Redmond has only itself to blame.

But, hopefully, some analysts, and customers, will eventually acknowledge that double standards are not rigorous standards, nor are they intellectually defensible.  Mojave 2.0 is better than 1.0, but hardly to the degree proclaimed.

posted @ Monday, October 26, 2009 5:42 PM | Feedback (1) |

Windows 7 Launch: A Winner Hits the Channel

I attended the Windows 7 launch today, and the success of the product really hit close to home.  I mean that literally, as the launch event itself was held in a NYC loft space that was walking distance from my home.  But I mean it figuratively as well, because I think this version of Microsoft’s client operating system, and the company’s confidence and pride around it,  harkens back to a time, toward the beginning of my career, when Windows really excited people and created a buzz.

Tech commentator luminaries, like John Dvorak, were in attendance at the launch, as was just about every Microsoft “beat” reporter from the industry press.  It didn’t stop there though; mainstream news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, were covering the event too.  And I dare say everyone in the room was impressed with the product.  including hipster tech bloggers, from whom I took more than a little satisfaction, as I watched them typing furiously on their Macs with excitement over Windows 7.

The event kicked off with “Kylie” (who, at five and a half years old, is probably the youngest person on TV to exclaim “I’m a PC”) introducing Steve Ballmer, then bantering with him and chiding him for the late arrival of his flight into NYC.  From there, SteveB spoke beamingly of the newest version of his company’s flagship product,

But Steve kept his words brief and really shined the spotlight on Windows 7.  He brought colleagues on to do impressive demos, including of the new Windows-based Amazon Kindle e-book reader software, and a slew of home media tricks like a single Dell machine sending distinct high def video content to something like 12 different widescreen TVs.

Following the stage show, though, was probably the best part of the event: a curtain opened to reveal an entire showroom full of OEM hardware, including notebooks, netbooks, gamer rigs and even TVs, powered by Windows 7.  A Microsoft spokesman demoed it all to Ballmer and attendees were invited to follow them around.  After the formal keynote ended, everyone was encouraged to try out all the hardware themselves.

This was no ordinary Microsoft launch.  The star of the show wasn’t Ballmer.  It wasn’t even Microsoft.  And in a sense, it wasn’t even Windows 7, at least not in isolation. Instead, It was the diverse variety of stylishly-designed products (yes, I said “stylishly”), from numerous companies, that were ready to run Windows 7 at launch.  And given a number of these products are offered at price points below $500, Apple got a double-whammy today.  And Microsoft presented it all with confidence sufficient to allow attendees more unfiltered hands-on time with the product than was devoted to structured demo and presentation.

Earlier in the week, I attended Microsoft’s other victory party, the 2009 SharePoint Conference, as detailed in my two previous posts.  That the two events overlapped and both occurred in the space of four days may make this one of Microsoft’s best weeks ever.  And that’s nice to see. 

My travel itinerary yesterday involved a trek out of the (Las Vegas) desert and back home.  And today it felt like Microsoft emerged from the desert and returned home as well.  And while there’s plenty more work for Redmond to do. let’s see if this week can provide a suitable foundation for more comeback achievements.

posted @ Thursday, October 22, 2009 9:29 PM | Feedback (0) |

SharePoint as BI and Data Platform

Day 2 of the SharePoint Conference has just about come and gone, and I’ve shifted my focus from yesterday’s pure developer angle to topics of data and business intelligence.  And there has been a lot to see.  I’m sitting in the last session of the day, attending the “Business Intelligence Power Hour” and began the day with an in-depth look at SharePoint’s Business Connectivity Services (BCS, formerly known as the Business Data Catalog, or BDC).

I work very closely with Microsoft Business Intelligence tools and members of the MS BI team, so I’ve known for some time that the entire MS BI presentation layer strategy has been based on a move to SharePoint.  We began to see this with SharePoint 2007, which incorporated the new Excel Services features, hosted PerformancePoint Server and optionally integrated SQL Server Reporting Services and ReportBuilder.  With SharePoint 2010, all this remains and deepens, and is enhanced by the addition of Visio Services (which allows for shared, data-connected diagrams) and PowerPivot (formerly code-named “Gemini”) which is a full self-service, in-memory BI product that uses Excel for constructing content and SharePoint for, well, sharing it.

But I knew all that.  What I didn’t know was that the former BDC, a somewhat niche feature of SharePoint that connected it, in a read-only fashion, to back-end data sources would graduate to the new BCS, which turns SharePoint and, along with it, Office 2010, into a full-fledged platform for creating simple browser-and-client, occasionally connected, CRUD (create, read, update and delete) applications, connected to virtually any database. 

Not enough?  How about the ability to “shred” your Reporting Services reports, and their constituent tables, matrices, charts, gauges and (new) maps, into separate components that can be shared and reused?  And remember Access?  That iconic stalwart of end-user database management?  Well, it too can publish its databases to SharePoint, wherein its tables become SharePoint lists and its reports can be viewed online.

What’s going on here exactly?  And what does this do for Microsoft in the competitive marketplace?  I tend to think the rise of Open Source web content management applications like Drupal and Joomla!, and their ability to be used as functional business application platforms (with a little help from some custom PHP code) is egging Microsoft on here.  Customers don’t wish to pay for custom development of simple data maintenance apps, and the Open Source content management systems have ridden this wave to great success.  Plus, they’re free.  But for many corporate users, SharePoint is effectively free too (because it’s already deployed in their enterprises) so why shouldn’t Microsoft make SharePoint serve as a data platform on its own?

Don’t answer.  It’s a rhetorical question.  We’ve seen throughout the years that most business apps are data apps.  Now we’re seeing that SharePoint, the portal, collaboration and content management system for businesses, is a data platform too.

posted @ Tuesday, October 20, 2009 7:06 PM | Feedback (0) |

SharePoint Conference 2009: Product Maturity and the Developer Story

Day 1 of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 is almost over.  The conference is impressive.  There are over 7400 people in attendance, a number that represents 92% growth over last year and which tops this year’s Tech*Ed and MIX attendance combined.  All this in a year when most events’ attendance is way down.

That should tell you something about SharePoint, and should explain why Steve Ballmer, in his keynote at the conference this morning, said (1) he wasn’t going to start this keynote by talking about the economy and that (2) SharePoint is a product he loves to talk about.  It’s obvious SharePoint is one of those things in Microsoft’s product portfolio, and in the industry in general, that’s doing really, really well. And there’s not too many of those just now. 

There’s a party going on here in Las Vegas, literally: tomorrow night’s conference “beach party” will be the Mandalay Bay hotel‘s largest ever. SharePoint defies economic gravity and it’s becoming pervasive in the corporate world.  And, when SharePoint Online 2010 and the Office Web apps (which sit on top of SharePoint) become available next year, it could also take off for small business and maybe catch some consumer love too.  That makes for a huge market and that’s good for developers.

But it’s not all fun and beach games.  Microsoft now has an important challenge that could make it a victim of its own success: SharePoint developers, good ones anyway, continue to be in short supply.  And while that may seem good for those developers, it threatens SharePoint’s long-term viability, and thus their own.  Because if a high developer barrier to entry remains for a product that is becoming pervasive, that pervasiveness might peak pretty early.

So what is Microsoft doing about it?  What I learned today is that they’re doing a lot.  For example, they’re adding Business Connectivity Services to connect to external data in a straightforward way, REST APIs to allow external systems to connect to SharePoint more easily, a SharePoint-specific LINQ interface to make server-side SharePoint development a snap, and a developer dashboard feature for diagnosing all kinds of programmer-relevant information.

And beyond what’s being added to the product itself, the most important developer accommodation has finally been made: The Visual Studio and SharePoint teams have collaborated to produce a premier development environment.  Team Foundation Server support.  SharePoint Workflow designer support.  Visual Web Parts that get built like ASP.NET User Controls.  Support for Service Applications.  And full deployment support, including deployment of so-called Sandbox Solutions, that can run in a safe, trial environment before being activated.  Plus, from what I can tell, much of this will work with SharePoint 2010 Online (the SharePoint cloud offering) as well.

SharePoint is maturing and so is SharePoint development.  And developers should get in while the gettin’ is good: the tools are productive and the and the market shortage is still acute.  Plus, the 2010 product wave is the one where Microsoft finally seems to have embraced the browser, and done so in a way that will sync with their cloud strategy.  This alignment of circumstances is rare and should be exploited quickly.

Microsoft isn’t Google.  Nor are they Apple.  Microsoft is still the company whose base franchise is Windows and Office.  But SharePoint seems to be the product that allows them to make peace with their traditional underpinnings, while extending those core strengths to more modern channels.  SharePoint lives in the browser and plays in the cloud.  But it’s a tool for office workers, and, as Steve Ballmer said during his keynote today, "SharePoint's becoming a platform just like the OS."

Works for me, and I expect it should continue to work for Microsoft, for quite some time.  Should work for developers too. 

More tomorrow.

posted @ Monday, October 19, 2009 8:09 PM | Feedback (1) |

Getting Ready to Share

This is my 100th post to this blog, but it’s also, in a real sense, my first.  That’s because, starting now, my blog will be syndicated on RedDevNews.com and VisualStudioMagazine.com, the same sites that carry my monthly column, Redmond Review. 

For those who haven’t read my posts or columns before, allow me to present a quick intro.  (For everyone else, go ahead and skip to the next paragraph.)  My name is Andrew Brust, and I’m a Microsoft MVP and Regional Director. I don’t work for Microsoft – they’ve just assigned me and about 140 other enthusiasts in their circle, around the world, that title. I’ve been a practitioner, writer, speaker and entrepreneur in the Microsoft ecosystem for about 15 years.  Much has changed with Microsoft and its technologies in that time, but a surprising number of patterns and phenomena in Microsoft’s strategy, product cycles, PR and marketing plans have remained remarkably consistent.  Some of those similarities, and some of the differences, are good for Microsoft and its customers; some less so.  A while back, I made it my hobby to opine on Microsoft product developments and market moves, mostly through frequent quotes in the tech industry press.  And about a year ago, I formalized this practice by starting to write Redmond Review.  The problem with starting the column has been that, frankly, I have given it much more attention than this blog. 

By getting my blog in front of the same online readers as the column, I have more than ample motivation to post often and, in effect, make the blog a extension of the column, where I can cover highly current topics, without the dual challenges of press lead time and word count limits.

One such current topic, and a decent justification for this post’s cheesy title, is Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference, which starts this Monday, October 19th, in Las Vegas.   This is the preview party for SharePoint 2010: although the product won’t ship until, most likely, the Summer of next year, we’ll learn a ton about it this week.  We’ll also learn much more about Office 2010 and the Office Web apps.  SharePoint’s market is quite big (Microsoft said a while back that it’s a billion dollar annual business for them) and it’s getting even bigger.  The product’s penetration within corporate customers is proving a formidable analog to that of Lotus Notes in the 1990s.  So this show will be a very important one for Microsoft, and that’s why I am attending it, for the first time.

The SharePoint show will also cover  the next wave of Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) stack, which combines SharePoint and Office 2010 with the upcoming SQL Server 2008 R2.  Since Microsoft decided to forego holding its standalone BI conference this year, the SharePoint show serves as the de facto BI show too.  This is of huge interest to me, as my firm, twentysix New York, specializes in MS BI and I sit on Microsoft’s BI Partner Advisory Council (PAC).  In fact, the PAC is meeting over the weekend on-site in Las Vegas, so the next several days will be a real BI festival.

I’m psyched for the conference and excited to be covering it for a broad audience.  So I’ll be posting a daily summary of the SharePoint Conference here on Monday and Tuesday nights.  Catch it at RedDevNews.com, VisualStudioMagazine.com or, of course, my blog’s home at brustblog.com.  And if you’d like live coverage of the conference keynotes, just follow me (@andrewbrust) on Twitter.  The tweets will provide factual coverage of the keynote announcements.  The blog posts will analyze those and other of the day’s announcements in more depth.

I hope my missives from the show will be helpful to you, and a fun read.  For the SharePoint show at least, what happens in Vegas will not stay there.

posted @ Friday, October 16, 2009 6:49 PM | Feedback (0) |