The Business Intelligence Blog

Microsoft has made much of the self-service Business Intelligence and integration with Office. In order to make best use of the BI features it is definitely worth upgrading to Office 2010, released to beta last week. A beta version is available for download here. Excel 2010 allows much better slicing and dicing of data, and through the SQL Server PowerPivot add-in for Excel that was known as Gemini, users can investigate data to reveal the information hidden therein.

The Report Builder is also much improved and looks much more like one of the Office 2010 family. It has become much easier to split out various components of a report: If you have a grid, a map and a logo in a report, these can be copied to a Report Part Gallery, effectively a library of elements that can be used time and time again.

A look at SQL Serrver 2008 R2 Preview.

The challenging economic climate has caused many organizations to take a closer look at their IT strategies in an effort to reduce costs while still maintaining quality. One particular emerging area that is being reevaluated because of its significant licensing, maintenance and specialized support cost is that of business intelligence platforms.

The release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, with enhanced business intelligence features, has provided Innovative Architects, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner located in Duluth, GA, with several clients ready to migrate from various competing platforms solely to SQL Server. Innovative Architects has developed proprietary conversion accelerators that provide software automation for converting from other competing point products to the Microsoft BI platform. Innovative Architects’s BI conversion accelerators can reduce the time and cost of replatforming by as much as 50%.

“Our clients rarely use the sophisticated modeling features that they are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for and, ultimately, ‘export to Excel’ to actually perform much of their data analysis. When we demonstrate the full capabilities for information insight that the combination of SQL Server 2008 and Excel 2007 can provide, our clients have been amazed,” said Tony Baldwin, Director of Enterprise Solutions at Innovative Architects.

More from PRNewsWire

A news article on how Microsoft’s SSRS[SQL Server Reporting Services] is making its way into the business.

“[Recently,] Reporting Services [has been] getting very close to functionality — in our estimates [it has] about 80 percent of the Crystal functionality –and we are looking more into migrating to a single reporting platform.”

Tangra finished migrating from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 about a year ago. Once it went live on SQL Server 2005, Tangra started shifting more of its Crystal assets over to SSRS. If — as expected — Microsoft closes at least some of the gap with Crystal Reports in the next revision of SSRS, which is scheduled to ship with SQL Server 2008 later this year, Tangra will almost certainly make additional use of that product, Ratchev reports.