Rafal is coming to Las Vegas, and not just to personally verify the statistical accuracy of its famous industry. He will be presenting a full-day pre-conference seminar on Business Intelligence, on 11 November 2012, followed by a break-out session, Attractive Business Intelligence, during the main part of the conference.

The pre-conference seminar (see below) consists of four, full-length sessions, focussing on what is newest in Microsoft BI, covering, amongst others, SharePoint 2013, Big Data, Excel 2013 PowerPivot and Power View. The last presentation of the seminar, Advanced Analytics, will cover data mining with Excel and SQL Server 2012 SP1. The main goal for this seminar is to give you a broad introduction to BI, stressing the user-oriented aspects of it, as opposed to the back-end. You can find the full description, and the registration link, on the conference web site.

The breakout session is an updated version of the presentation which Rafal delivered last year, and which has attracted nearly 1500 attendees in Orlando. It is a rapid-paced tour-de-force of short demos showing you not only the abilities of Microsoft BI, but also sharing its visually, and analytically, attractive side. PPTs for the conference will be uploaded on our web site later on, so make sure you have registered to get notified.

Below you will find the currently planned agenda for the preconference seminar. Bear in mind, that it is subject to change at the last minute, and without notice, as this is work in progress, until a few days before the conference, due to the expected last-minute announcements:

BI Pre-Conference Seminar 11 Nov 2012

Microsoft Business Intelligence is part of an ecosystem for organizational decision making: from enabling the use of any data, of any size, anywhere, and connecting to the world’s data, through to generating valuable insights, wherever you are. Microsoft’s innovations in rich interactivity for self-service data exploration in Excel 2013, optimized for modern devices, simplify the way we work with data and make it easier for everyone to accomplish their professional goals. While simplicity is paramount to the user, powerful, new, breakthrough technologies help process data large and small, simple or complex, relational or unstructured. Advanced analytics, data mining, predictions, tabular and dimensional modeling, all help you tease out the meaning out of the data that surrounds you, while making the process easy and intuitive for every user.

While we plan to highlight what is newest for BI in Office 2013, SharePoint Server 2013, and SQL Server 2012 SP1, we will focus on the use of the platform by end-users of Business Intelligence for both supporting day-to-day decision making, and for more advanced analytics.

To make this event interactive, Rafal will readily answer your questions, while showing you Microsoft technologies in action. Attend this full-day immersion in Microsoft Business Intelligence if you are looking for a broad introduction to all of the most recent Microsoft technologies that help empower everyone to use information more successfully.

Agenda

Session 1: Business Analytics in the New World of Data

Business Intelligence is growing rapidly as organizations learn to use data in new and more productive ways. Powerful and new means for unlocking valuable insight is, at last, easily accessible to decision makers through the familiarity of Office, and through the user-friendliness of modern devices. Enriching analytics with big data, and data from anywhere, is increasingly important, provided you can exercise control over it. Taking advantage of advanced analytics, while managing it by means of simpler modeling approaches, opens it up to wider audiences. These are just a few of the most current trends which this short, introductory session overviews, giving you a good understanding of the Microsoft strategy for BI. At the end of this presentation you should have a good understanding how you can help grow and transform your business with the power of the previously underused, yet now readily available data.

Session 2: Self-service Business Intelligence with PowerPivot, Power View, and Microsoft Excel 2013

Enabling every person to use information, as knowledge that leads to better decisions, and so helps achieve personal and organizational success is an ultimate goal of Business Intelligence. Due to the explosive growth in data volumes, and the variety of its sources, reaching that goal means making BI simple and intuitive, so that everyone can do it all by themselves, without traditional reliance on external experts or IT support. Microsoft Excel and PowerPivot enable everyone to be an analyst, while Power View and Excel help everyone explore and visualize their findings in new and visually attractive ways. This presentation will thoroughly introduce those fundamental buildings blocks of Microsoft self-service BI, including some of the more advanced components of this technology, notably Data Analysis Expressions (DAX), and the role self-service BI plays as part of managed, organizational Business Intelligence.

Session 3: Dashboards, Reports, Scorecards and Data Exploration with SharePoint Server and PerformancePoint Services

Reporting and user-driven data exploration has been enjoying a steady pace of democratization over the course of the past few years. Thanks to SharePoint Server, every user is now capable of collaborative exploration of their data in highly visual, animated ways, using Power View—although we have introduced it in the previous session as a standalone tool, its full power is available when it is run on SharePoint. There are plenty of other, more advanced approaches to reporting in this platform, leveraging the best of SharePoint collaboration and SQL Server ability to handle complex data, including multidimensional, and relational data sources. You will get a detailed overview of the process used to create a BI dashboard, a scorecard, an analytical report and a KPI using SharePoint PerformancePoint Services and a SQL Server 2012 cube in this presentation, and we will also outline other dashboarding options available to you.

Session 4: Advanced Analytics

Analytics is enjoying major resurgence in popularity, and there is a lot of new interest in advanced technologies that help tease out meaning that is hidden in your data. There are many approaches to find useful correlations in data, which do not require the use of big data analytics, but which are related to it. Data Mining and Predictive Analytics is very useful, tried, and well known. Newer approaches based on statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are becoming practical to use even for non-experts, requiring little prior knowledge or deployment expertise. This session will overview these, and upcoming techniques, showing you how even Excel can be used for advanced analytics, making it powerful, yet easy to understand, and without needing a degree in statistics.

Session 5: Summary of the Day and Q&A Chalk-talk

After a short summary of the day, you will have another chance to have any unanswered questions discussed in detail by Rafal.

Registration is available on the conference web site.