Kamal Hathi, Microsoft Director of SQL Server Business Intelligence, will be delivering the keynote at the SQLRally event in Copenhagen from 1st to 3rd October 2012. The agenda is available on the SQL PASS website, including the pre-conference activities...

Starting on the 3rd September, Microsoft are running a Business Intelligence Practice Accelerator. This is an online training offering for partners around building a BI practice and delivering our BI technologies. This is a new structure of Practice Accelerator...

I've touched on this topic before but it's worth another mention because there's been a recent white paper on the subject. The whitepaper talks about how to deploy SharePoint Server on Windows Azure Virtual Machines. It starts with a clear and concise...

The previous two blog posts have been focusing on Master Data Services . Given the title of this series, it would be remiss of me to forget Data Quality Services, the second piece of the data quality story in SQL Server 2012. Data Quality Services is...

Like a lot of people around the world, I've been watching the Build Keynote . During this opening of the Build Conference, Steven Sinofsky presented about the upcoming Windows 8 and there were a lot of demos. The first lot of demos focused on the new...

I've been playing around with Power View (formerly codename Project Crescent). I started with a simple PowerPivot file I'd created to analyse the transactions of a small dog grooming salon (I wanted something different from the usual Contoso demos). It...

I'm going to be speaking at the International SharePoint Conference in London on 23rd to 25th April. My subject is: No Budget, No Time, No Permissions. It's a case study of building a SharePoint site with no allocated resources. Come along to find out...

This nice video has people giving their comments on their favourite features of SQL Server 2012.

The SQL Server team blog has posted recently about customers using SQL Server 2012 today . This post has five case studies of big customers who are on the early adopters programs for SQL Server, putting to use the new features of SQL Server 2012.

Myself and colleagues (mostly Sam Solieman, but also will Thompson) have been running a series of webcasts on SQL Server 2012. The ones we've run so far have been recorded, so you can watch them on demand. The recordings are on the Partner Learning Center...

Someone asked this question on a discussion list and I thought the answer was one that others might be interested in. What do you do if you want to set a field in an InfoPath form to show the month that the form is filled out? This can be done by...

Data quality is important and data quality mistakes can be expensive. Imagine a situation where a company has two systems, each with their own data set. One system is for CRM, the other is a financial system. Both systems have information about customers...

There are some training courses for SharePoint 2010 available at a subsidised rate. These are designed to teach you what you need around key aspects of SharePoint as well as helping you pass the exams. These courses are immensely valuable for anyone wanting...

I was somewhat surprised when I saw that there were people considering putting on a SharePoint Cruise . It’s an interesting idea. You get a pleasant cruise to enjoy and you get some valuable training on SharePoint. The fact that I get seasick...

Donald Farmer, the rock star of Microsoft BI, is delivering a series of webinars on the subject of PowerPivot next week. These online workshops are being run in conjunction with Microsoft Gold Partner Panorama. Donald is a great presenter so I would definitely...

This video is part of a series showing the Microsoft business intelligence offering in bite-sized chunks. This video shows how to use Dashboard Designer to create a PerformancePoint Services dashboard for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. This video...

Want a broad overview of the capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010? Due to the success and demand of the earlier sessions, I'll be running another SharePoint introduction day on 23rd June in Reading. The training...

This video continues my series of bite-sized BI demos. This follows on from the previous BI Bites video, where I showed how to connect a Visio 2010 diagram to data in Excel. In this video, I show how to publish a Visio diagram to SharePoint 2010 using...

This demo introduces another tool in the Microsoft BI stack: SQL Server Report Builder 3,0. Report Builder can be used to create rich reports. In this video, I show building a table using the inbuilt wizard to report on data from SQL Server. This...

This video continues my series of BI Bites demos showing pieces of the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack. This demo shows more of SQL Server Report Builder 3.0 and how to build a report using pre-built report parts from the report part gallery. ...

This video continues my series of Business Intelligence bite-sized demos. In this demo, I show how to create a gauge in SQL Server Report Builder 3.0. This video is available for download from my SkyDrive .

In this video in my BI Bites series, I introduce the new in-memory analytics tool from Microsoft: PowerPivot. I show the Excel add-in and the new tab as well as introducing the range of data sources that can be used in a PowerPivot application. ...

Salmon, a UK SharePoint Gold Partner have produced a case study of the solution they built for Endsleigh Insurance. This is a powerful web portal delivering a customised view to their customers and allowing Endsleigh to work with partner organisations...

This video continues my BI Bites series, showing bite-sized demos of Microsoft's Business Intelligence solutions. Here I show the PowerPivot gallery feature of the PowerPivot add-in for SharePoint Server 2010. This file is available for download...

This video continues my series of demos showing Microsoft's Business Intelligence offerings in bite-sized chunks. This demo shows a PowerPivot application in Excel 2010 and how to build a pivot chart based on data in a range of sources. This video...