Tag Archives: boss

Boston SharePoint Salon: Go Big or Go Home

Big as in data, home as in “out of business.” Because there’s only going to be more data, and people are finally realizing that not only can it be sliced and diced and visualized in formats comprehensible to the business analyst—it needs to be. The questions are: how should it be stored and queried and where should the visible representations of these queries be displayed?

Hadoop, Apache’s open source, distributed computing and storage framework based on Google’s MapReduce model is one answer to the first question. Or you could buy a supercomputer, but, those are kind of expensive! And less fun to say!  As for the second question, of course the answer depends on the type of data. As this is a SharePoint-focused Salon, though, I’m going to nominate SharePoint as one potential answer. Why? Well, Microsoft’s new Big Data Solution will put enterprise Hadoop solutions on Azure and Windows Server, including the now available SQL Server Connector, which lets you transfer data between Hadoop and SQL Server.  So, if you plan on upgrading to SQL Server 2012, you’ll be able to access data stored in Hadoop from SharePoint, and do all your slicing and dicing and displaying in PowerPivot and Power View. Presumably.

Interesting, no? We think so. If you agree, please join us at Tico (Berklee Street) this Thursday, from 7 to about 9:30 pm. You can RSVP here, or email me! And if you can’t make it, but know someone whom you think should attend, please spread the word!

Boston SharePoint Salon Recap: Powerview and Fall in a Glass

Cross-posted from bostonsharepointsalon.com:

Last night’s Salon was, by I want to say all accounts, a rather smashing success. (Perhaps a smashed success for a few philosophes.) About twenty locals, newbies and visitors braved the seriously odious weather to talk about, among a few many other things, Power View and the revamped BI Stack. Many many thanks to Sean Boon (b | t), from Microsoft’s Power View team, for coming all the way from Providence on a tweet’s notice—your inside expertise was much appreciated!

If you’d like to come to the next Salon, consider this your invitation! It’ll happen sometime in mid-December–stay tuned for specifics!

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!

Boston SharePoint Salon: A Shared Mobility

Technology-wise, ours is a nebulous world, but mobile’s increased prominence is one point of certainty. It’s not hard to imagine using our phones to unlock our apartments, start our cars, buy our groceries, record our sleep rhythms, yell at our significant other when he opens that container of Chubby Hubby… And on the business side of things, an increasingly accessible workforce translates into an increasingly accessible workspace. More and more workers have a need for a mobile replica of their brick-and-mortar office: they need to be able to do things like read and approve documents, fill out forms and assign tasks on the fly. In SharePoint, we have a potential vehicle for an empowered mobile workforce, but at this stage, both in-house and third-party offerings are underdeveloped. Continue reading Boston SharePoint Salon: A Shared Mobility

Cloudy with a Chance of SharePoint

There’s been a lot of talk, recently and not so recently, about SharePoint in the cloud, especially with the release of Office 365. Hell, there’s been a lot of talk about cloudification, period (though perhaps not using that particular term). Cloud computing provider CloudShare just finalized a$10 million round of vc funding, Apple is letting users store and stream backups of their iTunes downloads in the iCloud, Google Docs now has pivot tables…From financial and ease-of-use standpoints, it’s easy to see why moving data to the cloud is such an appealing proposition. From a security standpoint, as we witnessed with the Amazon/Playstation hack this year, it’s rather less appealing. And then there’s the current lack of feature paritybetween SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online, and the fact that the latter doesn’t support farm-scoped solutions, full-trust solutions or WebApplication-scoped features. Continue reading Cloudy with a Chance of SharePoint