Today, 5 Oct 2011, we have two reasons to celebrate. First of all, Rafal got an amazing reception at the SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim, California. The surprise came when he delivered his “Attractive Business Intelligence” talk about dashboards and reports on Monday 3 October (#SPC202). Nearly 1200 people attended, the room was full, and everyone had a good time!

His paid full-day pre-conference seminar on Business Intelligence was also very well received, and over 100 people attended. If you missed it, you would have had a second chance to see it at the European SharePoint Conference 2011 in Berlin.

It feels that BI has, at last, reached a level of popular maturity and is becoming important to every organisation of every size. We are very excited to be involved in this part of our industry, right now. While Rafal was sending Tweets during the session by TK Anand about the upcoming version of SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services and about PowerPivot 2 (follow Rafal), you can now read a summary commentary of what was announced here. Needless to say, we are working on a video on this subject.

Our second reason for a celebration is that we had to close our earlier promotion, as nearly 200 accounts have been registered. Thank you! Everyone who was in the first 100 will be rewarded with a free 3-months subscription, once we start offering paid subscriptions to our premium content, planned towards the end of 2011. The first user to register an account was Alberto Ferrari, who registered about 2 hours after the site went live. Alberto will get a special prize of a full 1 year of free access to premium content. Well done!

The “clock” will not start ticking until the premium content has been uploaded. We will be notifying all of the recipients of the offer by email, as soon as that content is live, so don’t worry about missing out on your time. In the meantime, browse the existing content, make sure to watch the videos, which are already available, and look out for the new, free ones, which will be available already in October. They have been filmed, and they are now awaiting final post-production.

Please note, that if you missed out on this promotion, you can still register a free account, which will enable you to access all the free, login-required, content. You will be also one of the first to learn about the new content, via our newsletter, as it becomes available.