I’ve not posted for a while now, but we’ve been really busy! One aspect of our information strategy is to enable the delivery of information to an organisation in the simplest and most easily digested manner. Now data visualisation isn’t new. There have been a couple of trailblazers in the market for a while (namely Tableau and QlikView).
You should be aware that everyone with old ‘self service’ reporting have their development teams creating some really excellent data visualisation tools. Microsoft is pulling off something quite special.
Microsoft has implemented an excellent solution, based on none other than Excel, the largest licenced product ever! Now the truth is most users of data visualisation tools will use Excel in one way or another when the data isn’t quite right straight out of the box. If your pulling together visualisation for operational data, then pulling data straight from your Data Warehouse may be possible (lucky you!). However if you’re creating data mashups (combining data!) for research or performance management as an example, then this is a whole different game.
Now I should mention that Power BI Preview is the ‘second generation’ of Microsoft’s data visualisation platform. The previous iteration being heavily integrated into Office365. Having listened to the customer feedback (oh yes, you heard right!) Power BI Preview makes the distribution of data completely independently, through a very neat HTML5 based portal with many new features all enterprises will like.
For those Apple fanatics, Microsoft has developed the Power BI app before they prioritise Windows 8 devices. However as it’s pure HTML5. it looks great on all supported browsers.
If your often using Excel for data based activity, then you should really look into Microsoft Power BI. Also, if you’re planning to implement PerformancePoint or Excel Services for distributing self service reporting, you should be interested too. Take a look at our YouTube channel to see what can be achieved The Data Discovery Channel.
You can currently sign up and try Power BI out free, just go to the Power BI Site.
