Chris Bortlik's Blog : MSDN

Excel 2007 – Your Business Intelligence Client Solution

cbortlik — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:50:00 GMT

Many of my customers are evaluating business intelligence (BI) solutions. There are often many business drivers behind this trend including the need for analysis, reporting, planning and forecasting.

Prior to the release of Excel 2007 many customers would purchase a variety of different BI tools each with their own user interface, licensing costs and set of functionality. With Excel 2007 we have sought to bring BI to the masses while eliminating the need for a number of different tools and lowering the overall total cost of ownership for BI solutions.

Here is a summary of my top 10 favorite aspects of Excel 2007 for BI solutions:

Excel has become the rich BI client front end for PerformancePoint, SharePoint, SQL Server and any external data source or system. This allows users to easily aggregate, slice and dice many disparate data sources and get a consolidated view of their business.
By supporting 1 million rows and 16,000 columns of data in the same workbook, Excel 2007 allows you to work with more data. This addresses a critical business need expressed by many Excel users and overcomes previous product limitations of 64,000 rows which often resulted in the creation of multiple workbooks and extensive macros and programming to link the data together.
Excel Services enables you to easily publish an Excel workbook to SharePoint and then allow other users to access that data with just a web browser. This is of tremendous value when you want to make sure that everyone is looking at the latest version of data (aka a “single version of the truth”) and cases where you want to suppress hidden formulas, data and secure other sensitive data.
Conditional formatting adds powerful data visualization capabilities to Excel. You can easily add data bars, color scales, key performance indicators (KPI), and other icon sets to spot trends.
Pivot tables can now be created and used by anyone to organize and report on data. You do not need to be the “Excel guru” to be able to work with and change pivot tables. The redesigned pivot table capability and wizards streamlines the process.
The graphics engine for Office has been significantly improved with Office 2007. Charting and SmartArt produce professional looking graphics in very little time. These graphics can be shared and reused across Excel, PowerPoint and Word and eliminate the need for many 3rd party services and tools.
Tables in Excel automatically add common tools for working with related sets of data. For example, the filter and sort features have been improved and are automatically enabled now for Excel tables. You can apply multiple selections and even filter and sort by color (e.g. rows highlighted in green) and conditional format (e.g. by KPI).
Advanced built in formulas automate the creation of even the most complex calculations. Using Excel tables you can now even refer to cells based on user defined column and row names (e.g. Northeast, Southwest, etc.) rather than having to figure out the cryptic cell/column numbering (e.g. A1).
Data tools for identifying and removing duplicates, consolidating data and performing what-if analysis improves how you work with large sets of data and obtain meaningful insight from it.
Custom Office Business Application by partners and customers for building solutions on top of Excel. These could range from advanced Visual Studio .NET applications to basic macros. Since Excel uses the Open XML industry standard file format, Excel documents can be programmatically built and accessed from various tools.

Want to learn more? Check out the Microsoft Business Intelligence site and review customer case studies.

InfoPath – Going Green, Saving Money and Accelerating Development

cbortlik — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:52:00 GMT

Prior to joining Microsoft last year, I worked for more than 14 years as a Microsoft customer primarily in IT architect, development and technical management roles for large companies. Most of my recent work was related to building custom applications and forms on top of ASP.NET

One area that I did not explore much before joining Microsoft was InfoPath – especially what is currently available in InfoPath 2007.

With so many of my customers looking for ways to save money, go green and accelerate the development and deployment of new solutions, I figured it was a good time to write about my top 10 list of favorite InfoPath 2007 capabilities and solutions.

Many InfoPath developers are not developers at all! InfoPath is a great tool for business analysts and “power users” to create forms with little or no code. InfoPath also enables the creation of reusable templates and the segregation of development tasks between traditional developers and InfoPath designers. Check out this article for more details.
InfoPath can easily import existing Word or Excel documents into rich forms, which then enables the forms to be used as data input tools rather than just things that people print and then fill out.
You can quickly use optical character recognition (OCR) software to scan existing paper based documents into InfoPath to accelerate the move to electronic forms.
InfoPath forms can be built to target a rich InfoPath client and/or a web based InfoPath form running in SharePoint so users only need a browser to complete the form. The great news is that the design process is the same and InfoPath has a compatibility and design checker to automate the deployment and allow you to use the same form on a rich client or browser. There are a great set of InfoPath FAQ and roadmap articles to help you determine the right solution.
InfoPath forms can be used standalone or easily integrated into Outlook, Access or Groove. For example, a person can complete an InfoPath form in the body of an Outlook email message and never know that they are using InfoPath.
Using a tablet PC, InfoPath forms support inking technology to allow a user to write directly on an InfoPath form – another way of eliminating the need for paper forms.
InfoPath forms can be designed to support offline usage which is ideal for using InfoPath forms in scenarios where a network connection is not available.
Using XML technologies, InfoPath enables you to separate the data from the presentation device (e.g. PC, browser, phone) and to integrate InfoPath forms with back end systems and processes via web services, BizTalk and other techniques.
Need to do more with InfoPath than is available from the InfoPath forms designer? Good news. InfoPath forms can also be designed and extended using Visual Studio and managed .NET code.
Many customers and partners have used InfoPath to develop some advanced systems and processes that have helped them go green, save money, improve data quality and create more effective processes. Check out the case studies available to read more about what InfoPath can do!

Show me the proof!

cbortlik — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:49:01 GMT

When I meet with customers to discuss how they can use the Microsoft Office 2007 System to have a real impact on their business, I am frequently asked for proof and examples of other customers that are doing this in the real world.

Having spent 14 years as a Microsoft enterprise customer myself (working in various IT architect, development and technical management roles) I can certainly understand why our customers make this request.

If you find yourself asking for Microsoft to show you the proof, here are a few great sites and resources that you may want to check out:

Happy New Year!

OBA Resources on MSDN

cbortlik — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:50:00 GMT

I just returned from the Microsoft Global Exchange (MGX) sessions in Atlanta and was blown away by all of the great things that Microsoft is doing. More news on that soon ...

I will be going to TechReady soon to get a deeper dive on some of the technologies, including Office Business Applications (OBAs). In preparation for this, I have been going through many of the resources available on MSDN.

Some to check out include:

1. Office Business Applications Developer Portal

2. OBA Sample Application Kits Page

Enjoy!