Vizubi 2.0 Full Tech Specs – Detailed Features

Vizubi is a Microsoft Powerpivot-like add-in for Excel 2003, 2007, and 2010.  It’s greatest feature is, well, compatibility.  PowerPivot only works with Excel 2010, and the best version of PowerPivot isn’t even released.  PowerPivot will be targeted towards new Office and Sharepoint adoption vs. supporting legacy platforms.  This probably means that the majority of customers and partners will have at least a 2-3 year sales cycle ahead of them.

Vizubi’s in beta now.

Other than that, it has a laundry-list of interesting features on the site.  It seems to play in a similar space to QlikView and other in-memory column-oriented databases.  It even supports the QlikView file format.

From Syntes, a team that brought features to Cognos, Business Objects, Board, and QlikView.  It’s primary products before this were NPrinting and NScheduler, plugins for Qlikview.

Vizubi 2.0 Full Tech Specs – Detailed Features

Flipboard for the web

Flipbook is one of my favourite iPad apps.  It's a content-styler and aggregator for RSS feeds from my favourite sites like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Boingboing, and Buzzfeed.  They would be considered daily reads.  The tool translates very cluttered sites into a nice, flippable interface with the ability to zoom photos, share content and drill into the underlying web site.

The Treesaver HTML5 framework is a web styling tool that works with the iPad to format and present readable content similar to Flipbook. http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/11/01/flipboard-hires-html-5-star-but-no-web-version-planned/

According to the founder of Treesaver, he chose HTML for his framework because "toasters will someday do HTML."   I would buy an internet-enabled toaster if it was less than $120 and it had a Flipbook-like recipe app.  Smell burnt toast?  Stop reading the internets.
Here's four Flipbook-style interfaces for Windows.

Delegation, Claims, Active Directory…Oh My!…Aw Crap! « Denny Lee

Denny Lee is a BI advisor at Microsoft.  He goes through the joys of configuring security, Kerberos and delegation around Sharepoint and Powerpivot. 

There are many blogs on this subject, which to me indicates a failing in Microsoft’s security deployments, and the overcomplexity of Sharepoint when it comes to the Windows security model.  Users accessing PowerPivot within Sharepoint may notice that they don’t have access, when the same level of accounts for other users do. 

This scenario works out well when a VP can’t get into their director’s PowerPivot workbooks.

Sometimes the issue comes down to plumbing within the Active Directory infrastructure, where years of upgrades have caused legacy issues to creep up.  New users will be assigned default security permissions where migrated users may not have these permissions.

Following the lifetime of a security token isn’t my idea of fun, but it is definitely a challenge that will keep security consultants employed for the next few years…

Delegation, Claims, Active Directory…Oh My!…Aw Crap! « Denny Lee

OLAP PivotTable Extensions

This is one of my favourite Excel add-ins when dealing with Analysis Services cubes.  It can pull the MDX out of a pivot table, search cubes, add in calculated measures on the fly, and allow users to share measures.

The latest releases fix some bugs and provide a very useful feature of clearing a pivot table’s cache.  The pivot table cache, a monstrosity of XML code, is known to blow up many an Excel workbook.

Show properties as a caption allows captions to be exposed as real members in the workbook.

Worth downloading if you use OLAP cubes regularly.

OLAP PivotTable Extensions

DateTime Tally Table - Tomaz.tsql

GO 365!  Now that’s a good way to load test your stored procs! 

Five ways to generate Date Tally Table:

DateTime Tally Table - Tomaz.tsql

SQL Azure Demos

A number of SQL Azure (Cloud SQL) videos available at Codeplex.

Hosted at Microsoft Showplace.

http://www.microsoft.com/showcase

SQL Azure Demos

Customer Proof of Concept on New HP DL980 - Running SAP Applications on SQL Server - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Did he say 512 GB of RAM?  Yes, yes he did.

Recently we conducted a Performance Proof of Concept for a large customer using the new 8 Intel Nehalem-EX E7540 8-core processor HP DL980 G7 server. This blog discusses some of the configurations and tuning conducted during the PoC. One HP DL980 with 512GB of RAM was used for SQL Server and 9 x 2 Intel Nehalem-EP 5670 processor were used as application servers.

Customer Proof of Concept on New HP DL980 - Running SAP Applications on SQL Server - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

PowerPivot Sample Data and Resources - Download: PowerPivot for Excel Tutorial Sample Data-v.2

Two Microsoft Access databases and an Excel workbook make up Contoso’s sample dataset for PowerPivot available at the link below.

PowerPivot Sample Data and Resources - Download: PowerPivot for Excel Tutorial Sample Data-v.2

Using PowerPivot to analyze MS Dynamics NAV

 

Project Description
Project show how to prepare MS Dynamics NAV data for analyzing in PowerPivot for Excel. Project include Data Warehouse demo database, sql procedure to transfer data from Navision to DW and Excel example.
Happy BI for NAV.

Using PowerPivot to analyze MS Dynamics NAV

HTML5 Adoption Might Hurt Apple's Profit, Research Finds

Apple has tried to limit the use of cross-compiler technologies to allow developers a develop-once, deploy-all solution.  They want Cocoa and Objective-C to be the platform for mobile computing.

Unfortunately developers usually go towards the path of least-resistance, and even though HTML5 is just another dog with the same fleas, it is becoming the platform of choice. 

By adopting HTML5, it opens the market up for Android and, to a lesser extent, Windows Mobile.  Not to mention any PC or Mac with an HTML5 web browser.  Though those HTML5 features again vary depending on the browser and platform.

Did you know Google Chrome can run C++ apps natively inside the browser?  Google Chrome is it’s own HTML5-based operating system.

The catch with Windows Mobile and the new Windows 8 Metro is that HTML5 has always been a lesser player at Microsoft.  They tried to block the path of least resistance with Microsoft Silverlight.  Developers and companies were eventually adopting that standard over Flash and Flex, until MS proposed HTML5 and *cough* javascript as a first-generation language. 

Even with Metro, HTML5 is still treated as a proprietary Microsoft thing.  If you want to ensure that your code is not “view-sourced”, your main alternative to straight HTML5 and JS is to work with a WinRT component.

The walls of the fortress just look a bit different in Redmond than they do in Cupertino. 

I wonder if it was Microsoft Research that found HTML5 adoption might hurt Apple’s profits.

HTML5 Adoption Might Hurt Apple's Profit, Research Finds | PCWorld Business Center