Microsoft Business Intelligence Blog : BLOG

Microsoft BI and World Cup Social Media Analytics–Great Mention!

Patrick Husting — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:03:13 GMT

Just clicking through the links and noticed we are highlighted on the Microsoft BI blog site. Very cool. http://www.microsoft.com/bi/biresources/ ...(read more)

World Cup Social Media Analytics - How We Did It #worldcup #analytics @extendedresults @microsoft

Patrick Husting — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:31:00 GMT

A good colleague of mine over at Microsoft, Bruno Aziza , gave me a call on a Sunday night to discuss Extended Results partnering with Microsoft on the development of a World Cup Social Media Analytics web page. Bruno chose us because we have...(read more)

Apple Invades the Game Market

Patrick Husting — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:26:00 GMT

Nice article on iPhone jumping into the gaming market and the percent of business it does. Year over Year growth is impressive and makes me wonder what FaceBook does. Anyway, they look to be using Excel Charting in their article. Source: http...(read more)

Kerberos SPN Generation / Setup Tool

Patrick Husting — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:19:00 GMT

My friend Robert has come up with some tools to help with Kerberos setup. Check them out at http://robertlambrecht.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1738EAC7F6359C6D!2309.entry?sa=604119460 ...(read more)

Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2010 - Recap

Patrick Husting — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:59:00 GMT

More from Bruno at the Gartner BI Summit. ...(read more)

How Will We Make Decisions in the Future?

Patrick Husting — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:55:11 GMT

from my buddy Bruno Aziza at Microsoft. How will we make decisions in the future? Bruno Aziza, Worldwide Lead Strategist for Microsoftâ€™s Business Intelligence group culled the wisdom of the crowd to help him peer into the future. A little less than...(read more)

ClustrMaps for insidemsftbi.com blog

Patrick Husting — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:32:00 GMT

I just love maps with an analytics layer. Here are all the visitors around the world checking out our blog. I think some of the dots out in the middle of the oceans are the most intriguing. ...(read more)

National Retail Federation Conference and Extended Analytics

Patrick Husting — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 22:20:02 GMT

We are going to be at the National Retail Federation conference in New York Monday and Tuesday showing our solution developed around PIVOT by Live Labs platform. We are located right within the Microsoft booth and are expecting some good traffic to see this amazing visual business intelligence tool. We created a data extraction service for retail data that can be imported right within the Pivot tool. Now you can use Pivot in many different retail business scenarios.

Stop by the Microsoft booth and check it out.

Microsoft doesn't play the (traditional) BI client game

Patrick Husting — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:48:00 GMT

This is a great article which I have to agree with, when I look at the new tools coming in 2010, Iâ€™m really just saying Iâ€™m getting more of the same. Coming from another MSFT insider, Marco Russoâ€¦ :o)

â€œI know, the title is provocative. It's intentional. I'd like to get feedback about my opinion.

My point is simple (but not so short!). PowerPivot (which, you know, I like) and self-service BI are the new buzzwords for BI in Redmond. However, there are mature and solid technologies out there (read Analysis Services) which simply don't have a correspondent client technology provided by Microsoft that takes advantage of all the SSAS capabilities. I know, I'm not talking about BI for the masses, I'm talking about a more "traditional" BI, that can be still a barrier to Microsoft technologies penetration in some companies. In fact, who has a solution based on another technology might be unlikely to migrate everything just to deliver some report to more users. Right or not, this is what happens in the real world.â€

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/marco_russo/archive/2010/01/05/microsoft-doesn-t-play-the-traditional-bi-client-game.aspx

Do collaboration tools really increase employee productivity?

Patrick Husting — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:04:00 GMT

Just read this article about collaboration and time lost. They say a person looses over $3,300 a year looking for information. That is probably about right. Our solution Extended Outlook and Extended Excel retrieves a large portion of that lost ROI and we have proven it several times within large organizations. Do you need to install large web portal solutions or can you just wrap the information around the end-user with the tools they use everyday?

Did you know that the cost of not finding information is $3,300 per employee per year, according to IDC research? Thatâ€™s crazy! IDCâ€™s research credits ineffective searches; poor, inconsistent access tools; re-created content; reformats; and revisions as factors in causing employees to not find the information they need. So if youâ€™re a midsized company with 500 employees, youâ€™re talking $1,650,000 in productivity losses each year. In this economy, who can afford to take such a hit?

Source: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cio/do-collaboration-tools-really-increase-employee-productivity/

Wild Horses - Infographics - Discovery Channel

Patrick Husting — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:03:00 GMT

Great stuff, why canâ€™t I have a BI tool that does this!

Travel to the center of earth-Infographics-Discovery Channel

Patrick Husting — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:02:00 GMT

Iâ€™m totally stuck on Infographics right now. Check out this video that gives lots of BI on the way to the center of the earth!

PowerPivot Resources

Patrick Husting — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:04:00 GMT

Lotâ€™s of great resources on the web.

1. www.powerpivot.com : Official Microsoft Site

2. http://powerpivotpro.com/ : Rob Collie's site, lead program manager for Gemini, oops I mean PowerPivot

3. http://powerpivot-info.com/ : Microsoft MVP Vidas Matelis's community site

4. http://powerpivotgeek.com/ : Dave Wickert's blog

5. http://powerpivottwins.com/ : Denny Lee's (Microsoft SQLCAT) and Dave Wickert's combined site

6. http://www.facebook.com/PowerPivot : Official Factbook page for PowerPivot

7. http://bivoyage.com/Presentations.aspx : Company website that hosts a copy of a PowerPivot presentation they did for a recent SQLSaturday event.

8. http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2437685&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr : LinkedIn "PowerPivot Professionals" Group

Untapped-Insights Launch in BusinessWire

Patrick Husting — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:05:49 GMT

I wanted to make sure you had picked up the announce in the press on Extended Results hosting a BI radio show starting in January here. I'm very excited about the show and would encourage all of you to tweet and blog about it.

Think of the show as show creates a forum for participation, so please feel free to email the show your questions untappedinsigths@extendedresults.com and we will queue up the appropriate ones for our hosts and guests.

Our hosts are people I'm sure you've heard of - Bruno Aziza and Joey Fitts - throught leaders in the space and authors of

We are very excited to have them hosting the show and they bring strong industry recognition but also have great experience at producing interactive, engaging and high-energy content!

For an example of what you will see on the show, see Bruno's interview of our first guest, Bob O'Brien here. Bob is Bob Oâ€™Brien, Senior Director Business Analytics, Media & Entertainment Group, Microsoft and he has a lot to share as you will hear!

Also - remember that you can connect with Bruno and Joey directly via twitter (@brunoaziza and @joeyfitts) and sign up to their linkedin group - The Culture of Performance - here.

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20091217005328&newsLang=en

PowerPivotPro Blog, we really like it

Patrick Husting — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:41:00 GMT

Check it out, pretty good stuff.

http://powerpivotpro.com/