Full Day Workshop 9:00 am – 5:00 pm

WS 104 – From the Ground to the Cloud with Business Intelligence

SharePoint has long been at the center of Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (MSBI) world, and this is now changing. Whether it is the visualizations provided through Excel Services, SQL Server Reporting Services, the reports that can be generated out of libraries, PerformancePoint Services dashboards, and most recently the awesome power of Power BI, this massive landscape of tools can be difficult enough to understand without the constantly changing nature of Microsoft’s Cloud First, Mobile First commitment.

Join us for a day of demystification around the massively powerful toolsets that make up Microsoft’s Business Intelligence offerings. You will walk away from this full-day workshop with a working knowledge of the major tools that Microsoft has put at your disposal to drive insights into your business. We will go through installation, configuration, implementation, recommended practices from the field on how to get started with MSBI and but how to manage it, and even what to avoid.

This is a day not to be missed!

Level: Experienced

Full Day Workshop 9:00 am – 5:00 pm

WS 404 – Everything You Wanted to Know About Power BI (But Were Afraid To Ask)

Power BI is the gold standard for cloud based report delivery. It’s very approachable – you can get up and running with it in minutes, but it’s also very robust, secure and extensible. As you might expect, it has many pieces and nuances, and it’s important to understand what is possible, even if you may not take immediate advantage of some features, in order to understand what to use when.

This tutorial will help to guide you in building a complete analytical solution, using all the features of Power BI. We will start from nothing, and create queries that import and integrate data from many different sources. You will also learn how to refresh data using the on-premises data gateway and the personal gateway to connect to existing on-premises data from a variety of sources In addition, you will see an overview the many other additional features available in Power BI.

At the end of this seminar you will be ready to not only start using Power BI for your projects, but you will also understand which approach is best for different situations. Bring your questions, and we’ll do our best to answer them.

Level: Experienced

BI 105 – Cloud, On-Premise, or Hybrid – Where are you making BI investment decisions and why?

The movement to the cloud is here and it’s real. There are many compelling reasons to make the move, but there are also many valid reasons that that some workloads can’t and/or shouldn’t make the move. In the SharePoint world, Business Intelligence is one of them to varying degrees. What are your options for moving SharePoint to the cloud if you’re heavily invested in Business Intelligence?

This session will cover what’s available in the Microsoft BI stack, and how all of these products work together. With demonstrations we will discuss current on-premises BI scenarios, cloud based BI scenarios, and what the options are for a hybrid environment. We will also discuss some best practices approaches so that decisions made today will seem wise in the future. This session will cover a wide variety of products from the SharePoint stack, Office, SQL Server, and Power BI.

BI 201 – What’s new for the BI workload in SharePoint 2016

There are a number of significant changes to the BI workload in SharePoint 2016. Excel Services has been deprecated, and SQL Server Reporting Services has been significantly enhanced. Power BI is a big factor, but where does it fit? What do all of these changes mean for your new and existing BI investments?

This session will walk through the various changes, and call out the good the bad, and the ugly of these changes. It will highlight what can still be done, what has been enhanced, and what is no longer possible. Finally, it will provide a BI migration strategy for any existing investments.