Category Archives: SharePoint

SharePoint

Boston SharePoint Salon: Power View and Visualization

PowerPivot, Windows 8 Metro tiles, Office 365, Power View… if there’s one category of user Microsoft seems to building its future upon, it’s the business user. And by business user, I mean a given employee who needs to analyze and interpret data without writing a single query. Without even needing to know that “query” has a technical definition. For years, Excel was the only answer MSFT provided, but many of today’s business users want to be able to not only analyze but interact with data; and the data needs to be dynamic, and thus is optimally accessed from the browser. Enter: visualization, which is an interactive, abstracted visual representation of a given data set.Power View, née Project Cresent, is Microsoft’s new visualization application, and it sits inside SharePoint Server 2010. With Crescent, users can turn tables of data from PowerPivot workbooks or SQL Server 2012 instances into interactive charts, tiles and other vizualizations.
At the October Boston SharePoint Salon (BoSS), we’ll be talking Power View and the dataviz trend in general, its impact on database devs and admins, how it may play out in Office 15 and the next version of SharePoint and how many Euros, approximately, it takes to smuggle 20 kilos of guanciale past customs. Cool? Cool.
BoSS is happening at Eastern Standard, home of the Frobisher. If you want in, invite yourself on Facebook or @ me on Twitter.  See you there!

Business Intelligence, SharePoint

Masterpiece Theatre SharePoint: Power View and Hadoop

In this episode of Masterpiece Theatre: SharePoint, we’re talking Cresent erPower View. Press play to learn why Power View is good for PowerPivot and bad for Tableau, how it transforms big Hadoop data into technophobe-friendly animated reports and what your edition of SharePoint needs to get it up and running.

Related Posts

Events, SharePoint

SPC11: Porchetta, Pirouettes and a Whole Lot of Demos

[Jumpshot via the lovely and talented Marcy Kellar]

Unless you’re a vegetarian, teetotaler or Luddite, you’ll find nothing (too)incendiary here, folks! If I had to encapsulate our team’s SPC11experience in three words, they’d be: demos, sessions and networking. Since that is boring and vague, I’m going to break it down by numbers, instead.

24: Terabytes in Yahoo’s cube (from Kamal Hathi’s session “Vision and Strategy of BI”)

50,000: Organizations that signed up for Office365 within two weeks of its launch. So, 2.5% of what Call of Duty Elite got.

324: OfficeWriter Export to Word and Export to Excel demos shown. We were surprised to see that the demand for Word template generation was much higher than that for Excel, as outside the SharePoint world, that proportion is inversed.

Continue reading SPC11: Porchetta, Pirouettes and a Whole Lot of Demos →

SharePoint, Women In Tech

Angels at the Gate: Tech Conferences and the Booth Babe Strategy

[Disclaimer: This is not my SPC11 recap. That is forthcoming, but in the meantime, please check out our video recaps]

There are three types of people you’ll meet at a software conference: attendees, vendors and booth babes.  The attendees are there to pick up new skills, network and score swag. The vendors are there to convince decision-makers to make the right decision. The booth babes are there to reel in the decision makers. You could make the argument that the booth babes are also vendors, but as temporary hires with little-to-no knowledge of the product, the only things they are vending are themselves.

I have two main cases against the booth babe strategy. The first, understandably, is from a feminist standpoint. The use of women as bait is objectifying and creates, to many attendees, a gender-based binary: you are a man or you are a booth babe. (It also, by the way, paints the attendees as slobbering cretins who can be manipulated through their basest instincts.) However, the feminist case against booth babes is, unfortunately, too general to be compelling. Sorry lady, you say, sex sells. Which brings me to my second, fiduciary case:  does it? And, more to the point: does it sell software? Continue reading Angels at the Gate: Tech Conferences and the Booth Babe Strategy →

Events, SharePoint

SoftArtisans and OfficeWriter at SPC11

[Image via Seeing Stars]
The big day is almost here! The normally child-clogged streets of Anaheim’s Downtown Disney district are filling up with performance polo-clad techies, my hootsuite is filling up with #SPC11-related tweets and my liver is already filled with anxiety. From Monday, October 3rd through Thursday, October 6th, David (@davidwihl), Chris (@chrisrbaldwin), Ben (@bcjonesey) and I (@softartisans, @officewriter) will be repping OfficeWriter and our brand spanking new SharePoint Solutions Gallery at booth 630. (If you can’t read numbers, just look for the guy in the Mohawk.) If you or anyone you know has a need for generating publishable Word and Excel reports based on SharePoint data and integrating them into your business workflows, we’d love to talk to you. We’re also bowing to the swag gods and giving away a BlackBerry Playbook. To put your name in the hat, just stop by the booth.   Continue reading SoftArtisans and OfficeWriter at SPC11 →

SharePoint

NEUGS Part 9: Dress Your SharePoint Site in Corduroy and Denim

[Image via Vogue.com]

Up until third grade, my mother called all my sartorial shots, meaning that my wardrobe consisted almost exclusively of striped Hanna Anderson dresses, navy headbands that made my temples ache, patterned tights and mary janes. (And tutus. I loved tutus with an ardent fervor that was never reciprocated.) It was a life of rigid sameness whose boundaries I suddenly became aware of the day my friend Abby’s mom took us to the nearby shopping mall. In the span of maybe ten minutes, I recognized, located and broke those boundaries with the help of a bumblebee yellow pleather vest from Limited Too.

Today, I’m going to begin to show you how find your bumblebee yellow pleather vest in SharePoint. Like my mom-curated wardrobe, an out-of-the-box  SharePoint site is barebones, and its bones are even more boring than Hanna Anderson dresses. There are three main routes through which we can give it a varying amount of pizzazz: the browser route, the supported-tools route and the custom code route. We’re going to start out with an examination of route 1. Continue reading NEUGS Part 9: Dress Your SharePoint Site in Corduroy and Denim →