Hello There!

When you registered on ProjectBotticelli.com, you asked to be notified when we upload new content. This is our first newsletter since we have launched our site. By the way, we will keep these mailings to an absolute minimum, once a month or so, except around major product releases, such as Microsoft launches.

Summary of New Content:

• SQL Server 2012 Business Intelligence (article)
• Dashboards and Scorecards (video)
• Self-Service Data Mash-ups (video)
• Predictive Analysis with Microsoft SQL Server & Excel (video)

News:

The big news, of course, is that Microsoft have announced that SQL Server "Denali", now known as SQL Server 2012, will ship in the first half of 2012. We are very excited about that upcoming release, as it focuses on Business Intelligence. Power View (nee project "Crescent") promises to be a lot of fun, bringing highly interactive, powerful data exploration into the hands of everyone, not just data scientists. PowerPivot 2 and BI Semantic Model (BISM) build a foundation for the next generation of analytics, where analytical data storage is independent of the tools used to analyse it. While breaking the dependency of OLAP/MDX analysis (such as in PPS) on cube storage, or tabular-style analysis on Vertipaq models, has been touted for a while, it will become real, for the first time, in SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services.

For that reason, the first piece of content, which I would like to point out, is my commentary on SQL Server 2012 Business Intelligence. As a registered user of our site, you can view the full article here (you need to log-in with your username and password) --- this article will become available to all web site visitors in a few weeks, while you gain advance exclusive priority access, right now. By the way, this is a model of content access that we want to continue with: priority access for registered users and subscribers, with general availability some 1-2 months later.

If you have not been to the site for a while, we now have three videos, each very short, 3-4 minutes each, showing capabilities of an enterprise-grade BI system from a BI-user's perspective. Each of those three videos are 100% demo-based, with only a few words of an introduction and summary from a talking head. Our aim was to inspire you about the capabilities of BI. You can watch:

• Dashboards and Scorecards, about SharePoint PerformancePoint Services dashboards, decomposition trees, and the very fun PivotViewer control,

• Self-Service Data Mash-ups, using PowerPivot to mash-up data from a SQL Server report running on SharePoint,

• Predictive Analysis with Microsoft SQL Server & Excel, about my favourite BI technology, Data Mining.

We are planning to upload three more short videos in the next 2-3 weeks. They will cover Data Warehousing, Reporting, and Multidimensional Analysis, all from a high-level, finished-goods-as-experienced-by-the-user, perspective. You might want to show those videos to your colleagues, or to a boss, just to explain what is possible with modern BI, and also to inspire them about our abilities.

What's next? Our next big piece of content will be a recorded version of our highly successful BI Seminar, that was seen by well over 7000 attendees on its visits around the world. Taking it from a full 1-day format into the online realm is a challenge, but we hope to have it ready around the end of the year or so. This will be our first paid-access content. At that time, the fee-based, subscriber-only part of the site will go online, at which time all of the winners of our earlier promotion will gain their free 3-months subscription. If you were a winner, you will be notified when that paid content goes live. If you were not a winner, we will let you know how to subscribe to get access.

Request for Feedback:

As our web site is still very young, only six weeks old, we are still learning what works and what doesn't work too well. We would be *extremely* grateful if you would be so kind as to email any suggestions or comments. If anything is not behaving as you would expect it to, or if you have experienced *any* technical glitches with the site, please email me (just hit Reply), or leave an on-line comment, and we will do everything we can afford to do, to make the experience the best you could expect. We know you have high expectations, just as you do when you attend our high-quality conference presentations. Do you like anything in particular, or is something perhaps not so convenient for you? Should this newsletter remain plain-text or should it use HTML? Do the videos play smoothly, and is the resolution really good? They are supposed to switch bit-rate automatically to match your bandwidth conditions, but only a real person could give real feedback about that.

For instance, thanks to feedback from three individuals, we have realised that there was a situation when using Windows XP and IE (regardless of its version), or sometimes even IE9 on Windows 7 containing a proprietary personal firewall, would prevent you from accessing content that required a log-in (over https). The glitch was caused by a combination of a regression in the way IE9 handled redirects, technology of server name indication, and our somewhat strict security settings. The good news is that it had been resolved (and worked-around), but without your feedback it would not have happened.

Thank you, very much, for *all* feedback, any suggestions, and your requests.

Above all, I wish you a lot of fun learning about what is coming up in the world of Business Intelligence over the next few months. It is a great time to be in BI.

Thanks for reading,
Rafal

PS. Help us spread the word about and our content. We would like to build a good following amongst BI professionals. While we are in the web site start-up mode, we especially rely on your good word. Thanks a million, as they say in Ireland.
--
Rafal Lukawiecki
Strategic Consultant and Director
Project Botticelli Ltd

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