KTL Solutions today announced it has been named a finalist for the 2022 Microsoft Defense & Intelligence Partner of the Year Award. The company was honored among a global field of top Microsoft partners for demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology.
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.
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.
I often get asked about Business Intelligence and related tools, as dashboards and data integration have become so common today, and everyone wants “instant information”. After all, aren’t we all information workers today?
Since my company is a Microsoft Partner, doing Dynamics (GP, SL and CRM) business applications, my first recommendation is to “look close to home”. You may be surprised how much existing BI you already own and are not utilizing if you use Microsoft products. (Dynamics, SQL, SharePoint, Office) The Microsoft BI toolkit is not a lightweight player in the BI market, as you can see from the 2013 Gartner’s Magic Quadrant graphic below.
I love listening to the Kane Show on Hot 99.5 during my morning commutes into the office. So I couldn’t resist using Arnetta’s saying in the title of this month’s blog. When someone calls in to the Kane Show saying that today is there last day at their company they like playing a clip from Arnetta. In my case it’s not my last day at KTL Solutions but a job change within the company.
Many of the projects that I’ve been working on over the last 12 months have evolved integrating data into a data warehouse. Specifically companies are looking to import more data from other systems to do various types of analysis. Data integration is nothing new, companies have been doing it for a long time, but usually with a very manual process that includes vast Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
What Is a Data Warehouse?
A data warehouse is a database designed to enable reporting and data analysis activities. Data warehouses store current and historical data from one or more disparate sources. Some of these sources may include:
We have put a lot of hard work into this blog series with building a patron analysis so now it’s time to share the wealth of our analysis insights with the rest of the company. Power BI’s web site and mobile approach with the deployment of Office 365 and refreshable data through a Data Management Gateway, is the perfect solution. The Data Management Gateway has come a long way since the first version and with version 1.2 it now supports many data source types from Power Query connections.
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