Tag: Business Intelligence

The Two Power Players – Power BI and CRM



At the 11th Annual KTL User Conference, I will be presenting a session on Power BI and Dynamics CRM data.  The main goal is to give users an easy way to present information in a timely and simple-to-understand format.  In the session, using Power BI, we will cover the process of building and accessing refreshable dashboards with information from Dynamics CRM and Dynamics GP.  In the session we will discuss/demo the following:

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Top BI and Corporate Performance Management Trends for 2016

Another year has come and gone, seemingly faster than ever – and we’re already into the second month of 2016.  At the end of 2015 or in early January, some people were writing about Business Intelligence (BI) and Corporate Performance Management (CPM) trends they predicted we would see manifest this year.  However, much like my current approach to New Year’s resolutions, I felt it was important to let the dust settle, work through the workload hangover of the holidays, and have the New Year function as a soft opening.  This way, we can approach 2016 with a rolling start that doesn’t set us up for failure.  This article will discuss some key trends and trajectories that data management and analytics will take in 2016.

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Real Time Data Warehouse ETL (Part 1)

Part 1 – Implementing Service Broker as a Real Time ETL Tool

The cheapest and easiest way to solve the real-time ETL problem is to not even attempt it in the first place, but we live in the real world and businesses are saying that:

·      Viewing yesterday’s data is no longer sufficient.

·      They need a faster reaction time to respond to threats and opportunities. 

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WOW! A Dynamics GP multi-company Financial Dashboard

Dynamics GP can deploy some great Excel dashboard’s in GP2015 and Jared Hall created a awesome Financial Dashboard that you can download here.  The problem with all of these solutions is that most Dynamics GP environments are multi-company setups making these dashboards not very functional without navigating and opening multiple Excel spreadsheets to view each company’s dashboard.  So I took it upon myself to modify the one provided by Jared Hall to work in a multi-company Dynamics GP setup. 

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Power BI- Empower the User Conference Recap

This year at KTL’s empower the User Conference one of the hottest topics was Microsoft’s Power BI. No surprise here after it was one of the most popular categories at Microsoft Dynamic’s Convergence back in March. 

For those who haven’t heard of Power BI before here is a short synopsis. Power BI is an excel add-in tool made up of 4 components: Power Pivot, Power Query, Power View, and Power Map. Power Pivot and Query are used for data preparation while power view and map are used for data visualization. These tools can take large amounts of data from virtually any system and harness it for real-time, powerful analytics. One of the huge differentiators of Power BI from other analytics tools is that you can combine resources from multiple data centers. Typically, when people want to see the profitability of an organization they look at the financial data. However, this is not always the only factor, especially in today’s world that is driven by technology and social media. 

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The future of Power BI looks bright!

In April, Microsoft announced that it had acquired the Datazen mobile BI platform and were adding it to their enterprise BI product suite.  This is exciting news that rounds out the Microsoft BI stack and, better yet, it’s free for SQL Server Enterprise customers who have Software Assurance agreements.

What is Datazen and what are its capabilities?

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Combining Social and Financial Data for Powerful Analytics

This year Convergence was held in Atlanta. While this conference is a huge Dynamics Users conference, they highlight applications that are not necessarily part of the Dynamic stack. One of the most captivating sessions I attended focused on Power BI, Microsoft’s excel based Business Intelligence tool.

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Lovin’ it….. Power BI Designer Preview

Microsoft has a great new offering, Power BI Designer Preview, as part of the Power BI platform.  It is a standalone Windows Desktop application that can be downloaded from the Power BI site.  It is an optional Power BI content authoring option for users that are unable to upgrade to the latest version of Excel.  The application combines Power Query, Power Pivot Data Model and Power View into a seamless experience that will allow users to build their Power BI dashboards and reports. 

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