SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

So the Worldwide Partner Conference is going on in Houston at the moment and as much as I would love to be there, unfortunately projects here in London have to continue.  Still early starts and watching the world go by in Pret (coffee shop for those outside of the UK) is always interesting before the hub-bub of the day starts.

Anyway, as with every year at WPC, there are always exciting announcements and this year is no different.  We can hail this as official business intelligence in the cloud day!

Now many of the projects I work on consider Office 365 as a platform, however the more enterprise you go, the more the requirements tend to need some level of business intelligence.  I was excited before with the release of SQL Reporting Services Online, however as functional as it is, limitations and costs current pose this solution to be only for the fully cloud invested.

My new hopes for BI in the cloud however seem to be starting to be answered in the form of Power BI for Office 365.

Using the capabilities already available on premise (Data Explorer, GeoFlow, Power Pivot and Power View) with tweaking, some re-branding and a little bit of mobile love (mobile apps to be available also (Windows 8, RT and iPad, HTML5) it looks like we may have an answer.

This to my mind almost completes the Office 365 capabilities to truly propel the cloud for use in the projects I get involved in.  (Project Management, Business Intelligence, Intranets, ECM solutions).

I urge you all to read up on the following and register for the preview coming “later this summer”.  I have a feeling this is going to be major!

Details:

• Main Announcement Blog: http://blogs.office.com/b/office-news/archive/2013/07/08/announcing-power-bi-for-office-365.aspx
• What powers Power BI in Office 365 (O365 Blog): http://blogs.office.com/b/office365tech/archive/2013/07/07/what-powers-power-bi-in-office-365.aspx
• Introducing Power BI (SQL Server Blog): http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2013/07/08/introducing-power-bi-for-office-365.aspx
• Register your interest here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/power-bi-FX104080667.aspx
• Download the preview add-ins for Excel here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/power-bi-download-add-in-FX104087144.aspx
• Tutorial: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2013/07/07/getting-started-with-pq-and-pm.aspx

As I try things out, I will post my findings and any limitations I come across, but hopefully with the new OData / REST capabilities of Excel and SSRS, we should be able to have some fun with SharePoint list data!

Enjoy…