In eGroup’s latest Roundtable Series, Jason Webster and Brad Shannon walk us through the latest buzz from the SharePoint Conference show floor. Despite the fact it was 6:30 am PT when the Roundtable kicked off, both Jason and Brad were clear, concise, informative and dialed into their SharePoint A-games.

If you’re looking for discussion on any of the below topics, you need to listen to this 50-minute Roundtable.
<ul>
	<li>Business Management, Workflow and Collaboration</li>
	<li>Business Intelligence and Analytics</li>
	<li>Application Development</li>
	<li>Content Management</li>
	<li>Enterprise Search</li>
</ul>
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<b>This is a big one, we have customers registered that are considering us for assistance in implementing their BI Solutions.</b>  We have learned in the past a few things that I want to remind everyone of.

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1)      Think about the goal of what we want to communicate to avoid rambling about nothing (See Goals of this Roundtable Below)

2)      Speak Up so that your voice is clear on the call

3)      Slow Down and keep it out of the weeds from a techy standpoint.  Discuss the technology and why it is important but save the detailed tech talk

4)      Relate your information to “stories from the road”, it helps create a better conversation in the Q&amp;A format.

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<b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Format</span></b>:  Ian will be the expert resource and we will continue the Q&amp;A format we have in the past.

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<b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">What we want to communicate:  </span></b>

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<b>Goal: </b>Business Intelligence and Big Data is achievable in 2013 and Microsoft has the answer to do it.  Business Intelligence and Big Data can help you…

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<ul>
	<li>Gain better insights into your company’s operations</li>
	<li>Outmaneuver the competition by exposing trends in data both private and public</li>
	<li>Gain greater efficiency through a smarter workforce by enabling self-service intelligence</li>
	<li>Let’s not confuse the issue by talking about too many solutions, we want it to sound easy.  Stick with Microsoft for this one.</li>
</ul>
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<b>How:  </b>During this webinar, we are going to discuss how business small and large can achieve these goals.  To do that, we are going to talk a bit about the products and features that make up the solution.  Then towards the end, we are going to discuss how we tie it all together in a simple roadmap that will allow you to understand your data and processes, capture the information, gain insight and enable all your users to consume this information in a convenient and familiar way.

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SQL 2012 – What are the key components of SQL 2012 and how is it enabling greater insights for corporations into their data?

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<ul>
	<li>Simplified methods of building complex analysis solutions.</li>
	<li>Interact with datasets of increasing size</li>
	<li>New features and interactions with PowerPivot and PowerView</li>
	<li>New spatial analysis tools
<ul>
	<li>Support for curves or arcs vs. just straight lines and polygons</li>
	<li>Automatically backward compatible to spatial tools that don’t support curves</li>
	<li>Full Globe support vs. Hemisphere support</li>
	<li>Tabular Model and BISM (Business Intelligence Semantic Model) – read here for reference… <a href="http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/so-what-is-the-bi-semantic-model/">http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/so-what-is-the-bi-semantic-model/</a>’
<ul>
	<li>Tabular Mode enables Cubeless BI through the Analysis Services of Tables, Relationships and in-memory storage and the ColumnStore Index</li>
	<li>xVelocity in-memory technology allows users to work with ever larger datasets</li>
</ul>
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</ul>
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</ul>
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<b>Beyond BI</b> – HDInsight Server
<ul>
	<li>Microsoft’s Windows Native implementation of Hadoop</li>
	<li>Any Data, Any Size, Anywhere
<ul>
	<li>Gain insight into structured, unstructured and streaming data</li>
	<li>Not just your data, the World’s data.
<ul>
	<li>Your data doesn’t have to be “Big” to utilize Big Data.</li>
	<li>Scalable solutions that easily extend into the cloud or operate there entirely for Data As A Service</li>
</ul>
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</ul>
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</ul>
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<b>Office 2013</b>

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<ul>
	<li>Familiar Interface – “We don’t need to spend a lot of time covering Office and that is the proof right there.”
<ul>
	<li>Microsoft realizes that Excel 2013 and to a lesser degree PowerPoint, Word and Access are the end-users business intelligence tool of choice.</li>
	<li>PowerPivot in Excel 2013 has been taken to the next level</li>
	<li>PowerView for the SSAS Tabular Model</li>
	<li>Excel will be the only Microsoft BI frontend tool in 5 years and it won’t just be considered a spreadsheet tool</li>
	<li>PowerView embedded into PowerPoint reports allow for “drilling down” and “data in motion” during presentations.   Timelines allow animation and deeper inspection</li>
</ul>
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</ul>
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<b>SharePoint 2010 and 2013</b>:

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“We need to stress that SharePoint is just the end user interaction tool.  It allows people to share and collaborate on the pre-defined dashboards by extending them through additional relationships, drill-down, and build their own”

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<ul>
	<li>Allow users to access and share dashboards, KPIs and reports they build simply by saving Excel Documents to a document library</li>
	<li>Excel Services Integration provides rich visualization and interaction on the web to dig deeper with data and dashboards with additional information if desired</li>
</ul>
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Tying it all together:  I am going to ask. So Ian, we have just talked about 4 great technologies, how do you bring it all together to start taking advantage of these tools.

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Ian is going to respond with our Business Intelligence and Big Data Process and emphasize you don’t have to do it all.  You can gain big insights rapidly.

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<b>Our BI Process</b> – Want Big Data?  Just plug in HDInsight server or better yet, Data As A Service in the eCloud.

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<ul>
	<li>Document your existing Source Data Locations and Capture processes</li>
</ul>
o   Adapt Business Processes to make data accessible if necessary or use technology to make it more accessible
<ul>
	<li>Process you Data with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
<ul>
	<li>Construct an Enterprise Data Warehouse</li>
	<li>Make relationships within your data or external data</li>
	<li>Model that Data through SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)
<ul>
	<li>Construct your Cube with custom measures/calculations</li>
	<li>Go Cubeless, Allow users to build their own relationships.  Info in the hands of the people that know it best</li>
	<li>Report on that data through KPIs, Dashboards and Reports</li>
</ul>
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</ul>
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</ul>
o   Excel 2010/2013/Services + SharePoint for Self-Service BI

o   Dashboard Designer for fixed KPIs/Dashboards in SharePoint 2010

o   Ditch PerformancePoint

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