BI Events - Oporto BizTalk Innovation Day

BizTalk Innovation Day is a one-day event focused purely on Microsoft BizTalk Server related topics that has been conducted in several major European cities since Feb 2011: Amsterdam (Netherland), Milan (Italy), and Stavanger (Norway). The last event took place in London and it was a huge success! It was fully sold out with 130 attendees from 16 different countries.

During this event participants will have an opportunity to hear about the new upcoming features in the BizTalk Server 2013 platform, integration strategies, private and public Cloud, and many more.

Join this five MVPs (Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals) and most active community members for a remarkable community event.

Read more here!

BI Event - SQL Saturday Portugal

The SQL Saturday, owned by the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), is organizing for the first time outside USA, an SQL event here in Portugal! The SQL Saturday goal, is to provide the tools and knowledge to groups and event leaders that need to organize and host, a free day of training for SQL Server professionals. This SQL event will be realized all day, and will take place next 15-April at the Microsoft Portugal auditorium. It’s for sure a very interesting event, mainly for those professionals in the SQL DBA and DEV fields.

The session’s schedules are the following:
09:00 AM Niko Neugebauer
SQL Server Denali CTP1 and more
10:15 AM Nuno Godinho
SQL Azure Overview - How to Develop and Manage it
11:30 AM Ramesh Meyyappan
SAP/SQL Server - Software Integration at its best!
01:30 PM Artur Santos
Optimizing SQL Server for Sharepoint 2010
02:45 PM Scott Stauffer++
SSIS: Overcoming Common Challenges
04:00 PM Pedro Rosa
Introduction to SQL Azure Reporting?
05:15 PM Ramesh Meyyappan
SQL Server Performance Monitoring and Tuning

Click here to Register

BI Conference - Microsoft Portugal 2011 (day after)

Yesterday I attended the Microsoft BI Conference that took place here in Portugal. It was the first time that Microsoft organize a big and vertical conference focus specifically only in Business Intelligence. The advantage of this kind of focused event is that the attendees know exactly where they go and also is more easy to get support from Microsoft BI partners that could implement some interesting initiatives like show what they has being done in BI, but also to get the contacts of potential future customers and also employees. 700 attendees are a signal that Microsoft BI Tools and “BI world” have been gaining more confidence and support from the community. A special reference for my BI students from ISCTE (Lisbon) and also from UPT (Porto 300 kms distance) that were attending the event! This is just one more step on their interest on BI World… I hope they enjoyed it!

But because this is the first big BI event with 3 parallel tracks, naturally that has some contents that not fit at all in some group of attendees. Almost the sessions was too soft for Microsoft BI professionals, but was amazing for those people that were seeing Microsoft BI capabilities for the first time. Naturally this kind of event has a commercial purpose that allowed being a free event. So… a free event with a very good speakers and also with an amazing organization from Microsoft staff… what we can expect more?! I believe these kind of vertical/focused events are here to stay. And I hope to finally see an academic track where the BI students around Portugal could show their projects based on Microsoft amazing BI tools. And also we want to see more Portuguese speakers like Bruno Cortes that was planned to present at the beginning, but for some reason his session was canceled. There are huge potential in BI here in Portugal that Microsoft in my perspective should invest. What about the several conference partners? Just one Portuguese partner presents a session? This makes any sense? For me naturally not!

It was amazing to speak personally with Albert Ferrari that is one of my references since some many years. If you want to follow one of the discussions I had with him in SQL BI methodology click here. I confess that I don’t believe too much in Microsoft Power Pivot Excel Add-in (One of the main key areas of Albert Ferrari and also Marco Russo), but after speak for a while with Albert, he convinced me with some new features that I didn’t know. I am an advocate of a single repository of data, and create more “islands” of information scares me! I know that Power Pivot has huge performance, I know that could be amazing for a prototype, but I also know, Microsoft is interested in these islands (Office is a key area) and in a more realistic scenarios cannot be created by end-users, because they need to know a new query language (DAX)… If Integrated with Sharepoint I truly believe that could resolve some issues, even because the amazing Sharepoint design/layout could easily create a new end users habits that in spite of going to file system looking for their excel files, maybe start looking in Sharepoint that centralize them… Congratulations for all your sessions! Nice so see you here!


The Facilities and organization
Relating to the facilities and all organization, I just need to thank to João Bilhim e Miguel Vicente for all the amazing work they done on this event. They always give 200% to make these initiatives come true. On my side as a BI passionate I want to thank all the efforts done.


The Tagetik Session
In spite of their very good speaker’s performance, I was expecting a bit more about Tagetik tools. It was more a Sharepoint integration than a Tagetik session… for those that saw Sharepoint for the first time I imagine that it was amazing… but for those not, I think they was little disappointed because they have not seen the huge promise of Tagetik capabilities. Maybe in a next opportunity… but thanks for the speakers that made a very good session!


One day in a decision maker life session
The session was promising a lot… and despite almost attendees not having learned anything new, it was a funny and cool session… Basically, Sergio Ferreira (Microsoft) was telling us a history about BI (in Sergio BI perspective) and about how he deal with 400 new email messages every day and about the 1.200 meetings he has per month! He showed a power pivot excel file that reads data from outlook… It was a different session more focused on convinces business users, that they can do more with less effort. I think he made it well!


The Maciej Pilecki Sessions
Usually the speaker that comes from Project Botticelli Company is Rafal… See here my posts about this amazing speaker. Unfortunately he didn't come this time and Maciej Pilecki replaced him. Maciej is also a huge speaker, but the topics was very simple and generic and already included in previous Rafal events on Portugal. But for those who never had the opportunity to see Rafal sessions and are beginning a BI career, I don’t have any doubt they were convinced about Microsoft BI tools capabilities. Congratulations to Maciej!


The Alejandro Leguizamo session
Alejandro is Spanish and my MVP colleague. It was the first time I saw a session presented by him, and truly loved! He made a very good job in his session about “Designing scalable and complex Analysis Service Cubes”… it was for more advanced and tech users, and fits more in those people that already work with SSAS. Unfortunately I didn’t speak in person with Alejandro, because I left his session before the end, and I never found him again around the conference location. Congratulations Alejandro! Nice to see you here in Portugal!


More conferences like this one is desirable for sure!

BI Conference - Microsoft Portugal 2011

Microsoft is organizing a conference only about BI here in Portugal… I have no doubts that will be an amazing conference! It's a big surprise a Microsoft conference focused only in BI…

There are 3 tracks…
Track 01 – IT Decision makers
Track 02 – Deep Dive em Microsoft BI
Track 03 – Microsoft BI Ramp-Up

If you are in Portugal you cannot miss this conference next 25 March!!
It’s a free conference! Registration can be done here

BI Guest Corner - Oracle and SAP Events

Dear friends,
Today I have the honor to publish some feedback about SAP and ORACLE realized last month in Portugal and submitted by Maria João Gama to the blog.

SAP Conference Day
The SAP Conference Day - Business Intelligence held at the Museu do Oriente (Lisbon) on 23rd September 2010, and it was probably the biggest Business Intelligence event this year in Portugal, with the presence of about 400 guests. The whole event was very oriented to the pressing need to "mobile" BI solutions.

With a very interesting agenda, the event began with an excellent presentation of Timo Elliott (No. 8 of official Business Objects), entitled "The Clear Future Intelligence." This presentation, which I strongly recommend, is available on YouTube:


The following agenda items were completed by case studies presentations based on SAP Business Objects platform. These presentations were all realized in partnership between the customer and the provider of the BI solution (SAP partner)

Highlight the presentation of Ricardo Guerra Volkswagen AutoEuropa, for being the only one that showed benefits with financial translation, quantifiable and measurable on implementing a BI solution - Business Objects Dashboard. This project, implemented by Novabase, the main goal was to monitor the daily operations of the various IT systems. The success of this project has brought Volkswagen adopt this solution as standard within the Group

The event ended on a high note with a presentation provided by an economist and university Professor, João César das Neves

Oracle Conference
15 September 2011, at Sana Lisboa Park Hotel, Oracle held an event where they made the official release of Oracle Business Intelligence 11g.

This event was very diversified, because although it has focused on the slope of the end user, exploring the platform provided by Oracle Business Intelligence, also covered technical solutions for integrating real-time data for BI and Data Warehousing and Extreme Performance Data Warehousing

The first presentation was entitled, Integrated Solutions for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing, where it has been a demonstration of Business Intelligence platform - Oracle Business Intelligence 11g, which is positioned as a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, Gartner

It was then addressed the integration of real-time data for BI and Data Warehousing, through Oracle Golden Gate that provides a data integration in real time without affecting system performance

The event ended with a brilliant presentation of Extreme Performance Data Warehousing with Oracle Exadata Database Machine, which promises to increase the performance of Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) Databases and Data Warehousing (DW) in more than 10 times. Impressive!!!

It was also scheduled a presentation from Oracle Essbase, which was cancelled due to delays

Bio: Maria João Gama is a project manager at EDP and more details can be found at her LinkedIn profile.

BI Event – Microstrategy BI Symposium

Well… I come again with a post related to BI Events… Mainly because the entire world is open the eyes and the focus to BI world is growing a lot… I would not be fair if I don’t enclose Microstrategy in the more important events about BI realized in Portugal. Microstrategy is one of the top companies in BI on the entire world. After SAP and Oracle events you cannot miss Microstrategy event next 9th November 2010… Personally, I want to thank to Carla Bastos, Rodolfo Vale and Nuno Esculcas (Microstrategy Portugal) for all the support and availability to make this BI world better!

BI Events – Oracle and SAP BI Platform’s

Business Intelligence (BI) is the present and the future. Independently on which BI tools are used, the well succeeded companies don’t live without BI. Naturally BI is not only technology, but we all agree that they are the most important driver on BI. If you are a decision maker, an employee, a student, a teacher, or a simple person that are thinking to enter on this world, could be interesting see another perspective of BI. Oracle (15 September) and SAP (23 September) will hold this month their BI events with the latest news about their BI platform.

Join these events.

BI Event – FREE Sharepoint 2010 Event

The SharePoint Portuguese User Group is holding what they describe as a mega-event on September 29 2010 – the SharePointPt Day! I don’t have any doubt about their success! Huge professionals like João Bilhim, Andre Lage and Rodrigo Pinto are speaking and organizing it. You’ll also have the opportunity to see SharePoint gurus Joel Oleson and Mark Miller speaking! You cannot miss it!

I think Sharepoint 2010 is very expensive for Portuguese market, although, I truly believe that has huge capabilities and functionalities to make a Business Intelligence system perfect (BI is my area of interest, but Sharepoint provides you a lot of other interesting subjects). This week I’ll buy a 64-bits laptop to put the "hands" on it!

FREE Registration for the Event

BI Conference - Tech Ed 2009, SQL Server 2008 R2

Last year Microsoft shared information about Kilimanjaro at the company’s second annual Business Intelligence Conference, which kicked off on October 6 in Seattle. Kilimanjaro is set to include self-service analysis tools (codenamed “Gemini”) that Microsoft is saying will allow information workers to better “slice and dice data and create their own BI (business intelligence) applications and assets to share and collaborate on from within the familiar, everyday Microsoft Office productivity tools they already use.”

But last week at TechEd 2009 conferences, Microsoft announced SQL Server 2008 R2, which you might recall as previous code of Kilimanjaro. What? You thought Kilimanjaro was SQL Server 2010? Well, if you Google it, you'll see that many others think the same, and in fact there are announcements from very significant sources over the last few months talking about SQL Server 2010. So the information now is that there is no SQL Server 2010. "Never was." That the BI and self-service tools that were part of the release were actually the R2 release. That "Kilimanjaro" always referred to R2. The next full release of SQL Server will follow the R2 release by about 24-36 months. You can expect to see full release of R2 in the first half of next year - CTPs should follow later this year for testing.

I understand that Microsoft, like any company has to adapt its strategy when the world is currently in a big financial problem. In my opinion, Microsoft will be easier to convince customers to upgrade a SQL 2008 to SQL 2008 R2 than convince SQL 2008 to SQL 2010... well ... but starting to be many products, many names, many service packs, many cumulative packages, many functionalities ... truly begin to create confusion in people, that usually have great difficulty accept the change. I hope at least, that Microsoft does not change the format and design of the next version of Excel which is expected to have many more capabilities than Excel 2007. We shall see ... I am very curious about the improvements on the analytical tools and on the "Master Data Services"

Also, their advertising video is pretty funny (the introduction part). You can also sign up to receive notifications of the CTP. You can see it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/r2.aspx
Regards, Pedro

BI Conference - Self-Service BI with Rafal

Finally I found some time to describe the session that Rafal, following Microsoft invitation, held here in Portugal. As I already wrote in previous posts, Rafal in their specialty is the best in the world. A simple and objective way to show the concepts of Business Intelligence reconciled with several practical demonstrations are fantastic. Of course I attend these moments with great intensity, because they contribute, not only to continue learning, but also to mark and remember these moments. I will describe, in my opinion, the more relevant key points of the presentation.

The first point was approaching the concept of BI as a tool for self-service, where users are rewarded by a high level of autonomy for their daily needs for information.

The second point was the interesting and comical suggestion to be followed by consultants, when they want to sell their Data Warehousing solutions... they should not try to sell a Data Warehouse, but try to sell KPI's... this advise should be follow because the managers do not understand much of these technologies and are more attracted by KPI for making a mapping between their business and technology

The third point was the OLAP off-line functionality, which although this functionality already exists since Excel 2003, only now is beginning to gain more strength with the increasing importance that Excel is having nowadays. (These offline/Local cubes can be browsed by most OLAP client tools)

The fourth point is on the increasing quality of data mining Microsoft products. The feeling is that there is still a little more to move on this matter to “fight” against some competitors such as SAS (Enterprise Miner)... But it promises ... and in my BI thesis I'll show until where

The fifth and final point to highlight is the explanation of the strategy for Microsoft Performance Point Server product... especially on the discontinuation of the Planning module and the inclusion of the monitoring module through SharePoint product... soon will be called the Performance SharePoint Services.

I hope you have left with the feeling of having been present

Regards,
Pedro

BI Conference - SQL Bits IV and Rafal Lukawiecki

SQL Bits IV

SQL Bits IV is coming… and this time it will be in Manchester, 28 of March…Unfortunately, I will not go to Manchester because I will have to expose my master BI dissertation on the day before (27th of March), but I will attend to it on-line!

My friend Tomislav Piasevoli will be responsible for the session “Universal calculated measures in MDX queries”… I will try to purpose one session in the next event... maybe about my master BI dissertation.

Rafal Lukawiecki

Microsoft are hosting a one-day seminar presented by Rafal Lukawiecki for IT Managers and BI practitioners wanting to improve decision making and getting the valuable business insight by using Microsoft solutions at the Microsoft Offices in London and Lisbon. As I told before in this blog, Rafal is the best communicator of the world, if you are near Lisbon or London, you cannot miss it.

In Lisbon (Portugal), March 24th

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032402504&Culture=pt-PT

In London (UK), March 26th

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032403569&Culture=en-GB

Regards,

Pedro

BI Conference - SAS Forum 2008 - Special Session

SAS conference took place two weeks ago, but only today I finally got sometime to dedicate this post to my master BI colleagues Fernanda Romão, João Guerreiro, Paulo Batista e Pedro Cardoso.

They presented a BI session in SAS forum 2008 with very high quality. They apply data mining techniques on predicting European funds that must be assigned into educational purposes investments.

They are excellent master colleagues and very good friends. They deserve all the best and the opportunities to prove their high level skills. Below I show you some photos that I took to them!

Regards!

Pedro

BI Future - The coolest demo in the history of BI

Dear Friends,
The session about BI Future that tokeplace in Business Intelligence World conference in Seattle, was really amazing. Follow the link and check the Kristina Keer demo... I hope to be here when this come true...

Although this technology is somewhat futuristic you can quickly begin to see the value and intuitiveness of combining data in a highly visual and interactive context.

Ping back from:
http://blogs.msdn.com/bi/default.aspx

Regards!

BI Conference - Microsoft Events

Dear Friends,

Microsoft will organize next month a big event about Business Intelligence. Unfortunatelly I don’t have budget to go to this year, but if you are near Seattle (USA) don’t lose it… My friend Bruno Ferreira, that is currently working for http://www.ciall.com/ in Irland (Dublin) will be there… and is because that he’s a very good professional and he’s working for passion like me! Maybe next year I will join you there!!!

And for now… and because I don’t have budget for more events this year, I will be next week here in Lisbon to see Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO.

http://www.microsoft.com/portugal/dreamway/default.mspx

If you are near Lisbon, dont lose this event with Steve Ballmer and several good sessions, mainly in Performance Point Server, that I'll not miss!!!

Regards,

Pedro

BI Conference - SQL Bits III

Once again I went to the SQLBIts conference as I promised. You can refresh the previous event following this link http://pedrocgd.blogspot.com/2008/03/tmp.html

I started to write this post in the University room booked to attend the SQLBits III event. Almost persons that attended to the event already returned to their homes, and unfortunately I had flight only Sunday morning at 8 am. I'm joined with my friends Bruno Ferreira (Portuguese like me that came from Irland), Alex Whittles (that came from London with his boss) and Tomislav Piasevoli (that came from Zagreb, Croacia). The event was significantly more interesting with these 3 excelent guys! I attached to this post several photos only to refresh the memory of people that was there and allow others to imagine how the event was.I have several things to write about this weekend in London, which was extremely good in some points and a litle dispappoint in others.

The University of Hertfordshire
This is the University where the conference toke place. Is a nice place but too quite for a person that goes alone from another country… Bruno was also there but he went to Irland on Saturday after the conference…

Last SQL Bits, in Birmingham (UK), the location of conference was better because it was near the city centre and because I went with my girlfriend, she could went to shopping while I was attending the event



The Training Day (Friday)
SQL Bits III organization included an extra day for intensive training that cost between 150£ and 200£ depending on the selected subjects. For those persons that never saw MSFT BI Tools and Business Intelligence approachs from Kimball an Inmon, I think that was good, but for others was extremely basic. But was my fault, because Chris Webb advised me… but I’m disappointed because I didn’t see the same organization and the same environment in training day (on Friday) than the free conference day (on Saturday) … and for those (like me and Bruno) who payed for the training day we make a question for ourselves… for which day we payed 150£?! Why we make the question? The reason is simple… the free conference had several partners (Microsoft, Quest, Xlcubed and others), extra events like dinner with beers and pizzas, more than 400 persons, a party and some other interesting stuff. We also thought the training day would be an intensive training using the laptop and making some advanced labs mainly in MDX and Data Mining.

The Conference Day (Saturday)
Some photos of conference environment and a photo of Bruno picking some pizza and beer! Bruno is the guy with black t-shirt! You can also see the taller guy… He’s Alex Whittles that I referenced before and he’s a cool and friendly guy!




The Conference Day Sessions
I’ll describe a a little resume of each session that I attended, maybe I will go into detail in a next post, but for now, I’ll do a short briefing.

Alan Mitchell session
Getting more value from your data through data mining
After seeing the Rafal Webcasts, it’s difficult to find a better session about Data Mining, but Allan was really great and focus on excel 2007 add-In for Data Mining. Allan showed how the business user can apply a Data Mining algorithm without statistical and developing skills. Don’t need to know formulas, don’t need to know programming, it’s all there!!!


The hard task will be the ETL that is the most important step in a Data Mining project. If the dataset is not well created, even the top statistical expert of the world cannot identify real patterns and trends

Gary Crawford session
Data Vizualisation - Make your reports useful to business - No more "Speed Dials"
Maybe some people didn’t saw anything new, but I loved this session. Gary gave some very good tips that must be taken when you create a report or dashboard. He started from default charts generated by excel wizard and gave some design tips to create more friendly and understandble charts for business reports

He also showed some gauges, thermometers and traffic lights usually used in some business reports. He explain some best pratiques that should be followed in order to avoid confused and unperceptable reports

And as he told… running a business is not driving a car. Cars are real time, need real time response. Business reports don’t move as you read them. He finished giving some tips for a good and more usefull report or dashboard


Andrew Sadler session
Microsoft's integrated end-to-end BI offering
I never heard about Andrew Sadler before, and was really a very good surprise for me. He was fast, precisely and efficiency, in the way he explained the integration that could be done with Sharepoint, Performance Point Server and ProClarity

In the demo prepared for the session, he used the Sharepoint portal as the main interface/front office and behind the scenes he created several different types of reports and charts in Performance Point Server (including proClarity) showed inside normal webparts of Sharepoint portal

Andrew also show some tips using MDX that could be applied on filtering the reports and charts created in the previous steps

Andrew Wiles session

Does your cube support your users reporting needs?

As Andrew Sadler, Andrew Wiles was also a very good surprise for me and for almost persons that was attending the session. He focused in user reporting needs as Gary in a previous session, not in design but in funcionalities… for example how a simple indicator YearToDate could be available to the business user? You will respond that I can create a calculated member or allow user to do that using the MDX functon YTD… but Andrew showed a new approach that is abstracting all this stuff using reporting dimensions… for budget reports I believe that could be helpfull… I’m still tring to understand all the the stuff and how could apply in the real world…. I’m ansious to see the material that Andrew promised to share with us…

This session was really the more original and harder! Check Alex post for further details http://www.purplefrogsystems.com/blog/?p=18

Colin Hardie session

Choices, Choices - Loading and Modelling SCD in SQL 2008 Suite

Colin Hardie work for the IMGroup (the main Microsoft partner) and showed the approach about Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD) from Kimball and the capabilities of SCD transform of SQL Integration Services.

Nothing new, only the different alternatives to deal with Slowly Changing Dimensions, but Colin is very comunicative and also fast and precisely!

In the final, Simon Sabin, invited the attendences to eat some pizza, drink some beers and singing a song in auditorium!

Thanks to the organanizers, that although some little disappointing points, I'm sure that they did everything they could to do a fantastic event as it was in SQLBits III. Thanks to Simon, Chris Webb, Allan Mitchell, Tony, Darren Green and Jamie.

See you guys in next SQLBits!