Technet Ireland have arranged an event centred on Business Intelligence using SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft Office System to be held on the 7th of March in the Morrison Hotel in Dublin. It’s a day long event with some special speakers flying in from MS US:
- Using Integration Services to solve large scale data integration and transformation challenges.
- Best practices for upgrading to SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services.
- Design your Analysis Services objects for enterprise scalability and performance.
- Best practices for upgrading your reports and the report server to new version.
- Tips and tricks for running reporting in an enterprise environment.
- Overview of new Business Intelligence capabilities of Sharepoint and Excel.
- Interaction of Sharepoint, Excel Services and Excel with Analysis and Reporting Services.
- Building and managing scorecards with Business Scorecard Manager.
- Enabling advanced analytics with Proclarity Analytics Server.
- How PerformancePoint Server will integrate scorecarding and analytics with budgeting and planning capabilities.
A shocking number of people are unaware of the solutions that Microsoft Office System (Office, Infopath, Project Server, Sharepoint, etc) and SQL can provide. And these are just a small number of the products that Microsoft provides in this huge market space. I can’t claim to be an expert, far from it, because this is a huge area that requires complete dedication. Just ask the countless organisations that are spending huge budgets on SAP implementations that never seem to end.
I’ve seen people try to reinvent the wheel because they haven’t done research, e.g. a 2 man team spending 24 man-months to develop an Apache based web server that hosted queries/reports of a SQL 2000 datawarehouse … exactly what the free IIS based SQL Reporting Services does!
If obtaining, making available, reporting and analysing data is important to you then make it a point to attend this event.