SharePoint 2010 for BI seminar

This morning I attended a seminar put on by EnvisionIT at the Microsoft Canada headquarters in Mississauga.

It was a fascinating session, as I would not say BI was my area of expertise at all ! I did a couple of two day training courses when I was working at the OU, so that I could work with the SAS data warehouse, and we did some development work with the in-house SAS experts in order to build a dashboard type Management Information web site, but that must have been getting on for 6 or 7 years ago now.

Anyway, according to the Wikipedia definition of Business Intelligence, it has a number of common functions including: online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics.

So where does SharePoint come into this? Well in MOSS2007 BI was one of the 'pillars' whereas in SharePoint 2010 it now comes under the heading of 'Insights' in the new pie chart:

There is a great deal of functionality pulled together into this 'Insights' heading, including:

• Performance Point Services
• Access Services
• Excel Services
• Visio Services
• Business Connectivity Services

This mornings session focused on Performance Point and Business Connectivity Services, but we did get a good overview of the other parts too. So does SharePoint 2010 really provide "BI for the masses" ?

Well no, not at all actually. SP2010 brings enhanced portal features and enhanced connectivity to other data sources (structured and non-structured) but SharePoint itself, not even with Performance Point Services, is not a business intelligence system, like Cognos for example.

What it is, is a portal with enhanced dashboarding and other elements that provide the "presentation layer" for your BI 'system'. I have attempted to reproduce an architecture slide we were shown, which shows that to pull data in from other sources you need to do an Extract Transform and Load (ETL) operation, so that OLAP cubes can be built using SQL Server's Reporting Services, and this in turn can feed the data to the SharePoint components for rendering and display:

Click on the diagram to see a full sized version

BI for the masses then ? Maybe, but possibly more because of the ability of business power users to use SharePoint designer without recourse to professional developers in order to build their dashboard sites, but that is definitely power user - not 'normal' user. That being said, it does appear easier to do things than my 'back in the day' SAS experience (which is what you would hope after 6 years !) and if you have any experience at all with building 'web part' pages in MOSS2007, you will feel at home.

Visio Services adds an interesting element to the mix - it is basically Microsofts's 'mashup' engine - producing interactive graphics using Silverlight, which allow you to graphically interact with data. For example if you have those lovely Visio diagrams of your data centre (or server room) that infrastructure people normally delight in creating - you can use this as graphical element and combine it with data from your monitoring systems so that if a server goes offline, then it goes red and flashes in the picture ! OK, not a very BI centric example, but you get the idea.

Excel and Access Services are there to help provide some centralised management of the data created, stored and manipulated in these tools. I have always thought that Access 'End User Computing' was a bit of nightmare, non-developers using a desktop tool to 'develop' what often turn into business critical LOB apps. Excel can be the same, I have seen businesses where the financial 'system' is 20 highly complex interlinked Excel files... !! So Excel and Access services allow you to draw things back towards the centralised management that allows you be sure what is the 'single source of truth' by publishing the information via SharePoint.

So is SP2010 really "BI for the masses" - no way ! No more than MOSS2007 was really "ECM for the masses" - these are just horrible marketing phrases. However will SP2010 with enterprise CAL's and the attendant SQL Server 2008 licenses be able to provide "timely access to business intelligence data" - absolutely ! And it will provide the tools and capabilities to allow you to slice and dice as you require, and to mash it up and present it in easily digestible formats.

Add to that the capability to use the 'Insights' elements with the collaboration tools such as blogs and wiki's and other social computing elements (user tagging and rating) to explain values, trends, the benchmarks your using etc, etc, then SP2010 definately provides the basis for building highly interactive and very usable 'decision support systems'.

A big thanks to Peter Carson, President of EnvisionIT, Joe Seguin Senior Consultant at EnvisionIT and Eric Moll of Microsoft for an excellent briefing.

Divulge your innermost (intranet) secrets

So the brilliant west coast gang at ThoughtFarmer have put up an excellent new site called:

Intranet Secrets

They beseech you to drop by and anonymously leave some gems of wisdom or wit about your intranet - go on, you know you want to...... :-)

There are a few good witty entries already, so I urge you to go and add yours. On the serious side, some of the comments will make you shake your head in wonder.......

Now AIIM Enterprise 2.0 Practitioner Certified

So, that's this years first bit of professional development completed - even though I managed to break the AIIM online / elearning system - twice !

Yep, another logo to add to the side bar !

I enjoyed the course. It puts a heavy emphasis on Prof. Andrew McAfee's original SLATES model, and on Dion Hinchcliffe's FLATNESSES extension of the model.

The 'blurb' on the AIIM site states:
"The E2.0 Practitioner Certificate program covers the concepts and technologies of Enterprise 2.0. During this course you will learn about wikis; blogs; social networking; feeds; search; tagging; folksonomies; ratings/reviews; mashups; collaboration; and worker models."

I havee been using many if not most of these technologies for years, and I have used these two E.20 models on this blog to assess the the concept of "ECM 2.0" for example. So to some extent this course was fairly easy for me because I am certainly not new to the subject matter, even passing some of the module exams without studying the material first :-)

That said, I did listen to all of Dan Keldsen's presentations, and read through all of the material in order to provide a rather light weight assessment for you my readers (OK, a friend said he was thinking of taking the course and asked me to provide my opinion). I first met Dan at a conference years ago and there is no doubt that he "knows his stuff" as we say in Yorkshire. Just to make it clear, I did the online elearning version of this course, not the class room version. I have done both before, and generally I find all AIIM training materials to have been of good quality, and morevoer, actually useful in 'real world' work.

So overall, I would definitely recommend this course to n00b's - if you have no previous experience, or shallow experience in some particular aspect of the enterprise 2.0 / enterprise social computing / collaboration world, then this course provides a good overview of the progression from E 1.0 via E 1.5 to E2.0

If you have some knowledge, then like myself it might be handy to get the certification as an illustration of your continuing professional development.

If I have to rate it, then I would give it an 8 out of 10 for the material.

Finally a big thanks to Maureen at AIIM who sorted things out for me when the technology failed (first time ever, as I said I have done AIIM online courses before) - trust me to break the online exam system..........

Guest writing for CMS Wire

I have been approached by CMS Wire, who liked my writing on my humble little blog here, and so I will be writing at least one article a month for them, and the first one is now available here:

SharePoint Enterprise Search: Lessons Learned in the field

Briefly its about our experiences at work with SharePoint search. My manager and AVP have been working on this since well before I joined them. The Proof Of Concept which saw the enterprise search features of SharePoint deployed to a group of users within the IT division has been very successful. We are now moving into production with the facility to be provided to the whole of the IT division - around 500 people.

So its not 'enterprise' search across the whole of our enterprise, but it is 'federated search' in that many existing information silo's are being indexed.

If your interested in learning more, I will be joining my old friend Martin White, Managing Director of Intranet Focus Ltd, and author of two excellent books on enterprise search, at Enterprise Search Summit East in New York.

We will be running a pre-conference workshop on Monday the 10th of May entitled: Getting the best from SharePoint Search Implementations. Hopefully we will see you there, come and say hi.