I will be speaking at both US and European SharePoint Conferences 2014, presenting about all that’s new and exciting in the world of BI and advanced analytics. In addition to my breakout presentations, at both conferences, I will also teach a full-day pre-conference seminar (2 March and 5 May), which will focus on the entire Microsoft BI stack, including the new Power BI, HDInsight for big data, and all the most recent news regarding advanced analytics—2014 will be a very busy year. Register here for the US event taking place in Las Vegas, or here for the European conference, in Barcelona.

Below you will find the full agenda of the pre-conference seminar, which will start in the morning and finishes at the end of the conference day. It consist of 5 sessions, with coffee and lunch breaks. Bear in mind that last-minute changes are likely, when the news are announced.

Agenda for Microsoft Business Intelligence: Power & Simplicity

The extraordinary growth in the amounts, variety, and accessibility of data provides a new foundation for courageous, accurate, yet less risky, fast decision making. What if your workforce and leaders no longer needed to rely solely on instincts when making complex choices? With business insights, provable with your own and external data—big, or small—you could empower employees with facts they would trust, and which should give them decisive confidence to improve performance and organisational growth.

To succeed, you need to balance agility and control—while at the same time making business intelligence easy to access and share wherever your staff need to work. No one knows the modern office worker better than Microsoft. At the same time, no other company can give you the oversight of business intelligence demanded by corporate governance, and the manageability required by mission-critical IT.

Rafal Lukawiecki will present all the latest advancements in business intelligence from Microsoft. We plan to bring them to you in many live demos, explanations, and discussions that will answer your questions during the day. While focusing on the overall BI platform, we will showcase the newest innovation, including Office 365 and Power BI, SharePoint, Parallel Data Warehouse, SQL Server 2014 and even the cutting edge, advanced cloud-based big data analytics from Microsoft, including HDInsight. Attend this seminar and turn data into your and your organisation’s business advantage.

Session 1: Overview: From data to business advantage

Let us help you understand the goals of modern business intelligence, and the role analytics can play in your organisation. This introductory presentation will overview and demo the key concepts and the newest technology, while discussing the relevant case studies, such as Microsoft own, internal business performance dashboards and reports, Halo in-game Xbox Live analytics, and other customer cases from the world of finance, operations, marketing and sales, manufacturing, and HR. The newest, cloud-based, mobile-ready, user-focused technology for analytics from Microsoft is called Power BI, and we will talk about in this opening presentation. It takes what you create in Excel, using Power Pivot and Power Query, and lets you share it, collaborate on it, visualise it, keep up-to-date in the cloud, and even query it by asking natural-language questions, using Power BI Q&A feature.  We will also briefly introduce the remainder of the Microsoft platform for analytics, including: Office 365, Parallel Data Warehouse, SQL Server 2014, SharePoint, and even the cutting edge, advanced cloud-based big data analytics, although those aspects will be discussed in the remaining sessions of the day in more detail.

Session 2: Getting the Intelligence: Power Pivot and Power Query

Self-service business analytics requires self-service data integration and modelling. To do that you use Excel 2013 and its built-in data model, created and enriched using Power Pivot, which comes pre-installed in fuller editions of Excel. Once you build your models, you can share them with others, using Power BI. Similarly, Power Pivot is well suited to SharePoint collaboration, allowing data models to be shared between team members. Power Query technology, also part of Excel, provides a great tool for self-service data integration, extending what is possible with Power Pivot, by letting you access, pre-process, cleanse, and mash-up various cloud-based, and corporate data sources. Like with Power Pivot, you use it inside Excel, but you can share your results in the cloud, using Power BI. This session will overview all of the variants of these two technologies, helping you select the best combination for your BI needs: cloud, on-premise, or a hybrid of the two.

Session 3: Visualising Insight: Power View and Power Map

The remaining BI-focused components of Excel 2013 provide rich, interactive exploration of data, its visualisation with animation and geographical reporting. Some of this technology is hosted in the Power BI cloud, and you do not need to maintain it, whilst benefiting from the work of Microsoft experts who ensure its reliability, availability, and performance, all thanks to the multi-billion-dollar Microsoft investment in its cloud infrastructure. On the other hand, Power View is also suited to full on-premise use, either as included in Excel 2013, or as a hosted service on your SharePoint server farm. This presentation will focus on all of those aspects of providing rich data visualisation, in order to enable you to make the best technology choices.

Session 4: Big Data Analytics with Microsoft BI

Big Data comes in many forms. Traditional, relational big data, as well as cutting-edge, non-relational, or unstructured, and even fast streaming data, all can be analysed to give you valuable business insights using a combination of Microsoft HDInsight for Azure, a cloud-based Hadoop technology, Hortonworks Hadoop Data Platform for Windows Server (HDP) and the Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse. Although each of these technologies caters to a different aspect of big data analytics, they all work seamlessly together, thanks to innovation such as PolyBase, while anyone can query the results using nothing more complex than Excel and SharePoint. Since big data, and Hadoop, are still relatively new topics, this presentation will also include a good introduction to the key concepts of this exciting analytical technology.

Session 5: Wrap-up and Q&A

We will close the day by answering remaining questions. Rafal will also use this opportunity to show additional demos, if requested, to explain any of the remaining aspects of the platform that would be of interest to you.

[Last updated on 24 February 2014]