Just another quick update from me, this time on day 2 of the Microsoft BI Conference in Seattle.
One of the most important sessions for me was ‘Mastering Master Data Management’, delivered by Colin White & Kirk Haselden. The summary for the session quite openly states that ‘there is a lot of confusion surrounding Master Data Management (MDM)’. I would agree with this – but hopefully this presentation goes some way to addressing people’s questions on the subject. The presentation covers some really good theory, showing that there are several different ways that MDM can be approached, although unfortunately we didn’t get a look at the Microsoft MDM solution just yet.
There was also more on Gemini yesterday, including a new stand in the exhibitor section where it was possible to talk to the development team. I got to see the new ‘slicer’ feature of the Gemini pivot tables in a bit more detail, which is a fairly similar to the slicers/filters in QlikView.
Speaking about exhibitors, I also spent a bit of time at the Orange Peel stand, where I saw a demo of their Business Intelligence Studio product, which has actually been out for a while now. Business Intelligence Studio is an Excel add-in for PerformancePoint that allows the creation of PPS form templates with a number of interesting features, including the ability to add new dimension members from Excel, cascading filters, and the ability to run rules from Excel buttons to name a few.
Finally there was also a PPS Planning session titled ‘Implementation Tips And Tricks’, delivered by Celia O’Kane & Julio Triana. This session covered some useful solutions around performance, business rules and security. Again, the presentation can be downloaded here.
