Integrating PerformancePoint with Twitter

Next month I (on behalf of TGO Consulting) am doing a BI presentation at the Spring 2011 IT Forum for the Certified General Accountants of Ontario and I have been racking my brain to come up with some new twists to the presentation as I just didn’t want to show the same old stuff.  After much thinking I decided I was going to show how PerformancePoint Services can be integrated with Twitter.  Now why would you want to do this you ask? Why wouldn’t you want to do this I say!

In a perfect world, all data would be in a structured format (i.e., stored in databases and normalized) that would lend itself to quick, easy and powerful slicing and dicing to support the decision-making process.  Unfortunately we don’t live in that perfect world and huge amount of the data that decision makers need lies in an unstructured format.  This data resides in things like Word documents, Emails, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs and on the internet in forums and websites.  The dilemma is that compiling and analyzing this unstructured data is time consuming and difficult, but not doing so means that decisions are being made based on incomplete data sets.

The Microsoft Business Intelligence Stack Cheat Sheet

Two questions I tend to get asked over and over again are:

1. Exactly what products are you talking about when you refer to the Microsoft BI stack?
2. Where do I get more information on a particular product in the stack?

So being the lazy and generally unsociable person I am, I decided to bite the bullet and create a post that I could just point people to rather than having to retype my answers over and over again.  So below are the components that I consider part of the Microsoft BI solution offering, as well as some links to more information on those products.  If I have missed anything or if you have some suggestions for some additional/better links drop me a line and I will add it to the list.  I am also going to pin this to my main navigation bar so people can find it easily.  So without further adieu here is the list:

Granted MVP Award Again by Microsoft

I received a great email this morning that announced that I had been re-awarded the Microsoft MVP award.  A thank you to Microsoft and to Simram for the nod of confidence.  I always get a l ittle chuckle about this announcement due to my history with the MVP and the fact that my award cycle is always announced on April Fool’s Day.  What was it that PT Barnum said again?

Microsoft All-Up BI Demo Image X Available

So over at the Microsoft Online Demo Solutions site there is a new download available.  It is entitled Microsoft All-Up BI Demo Image X.  I am downloading it now and have been so for the past couple days.  I am hoping that this new image will be a big step forward from the poorly done 9.2 image.  Only time will tell.  And it will take time because the site that hosts the download for the demo is unbelievably painfully slow.  Not to mention the fact that it is a 40+ part download and the site does not use a download manager.  That means clicking and downloading 40+ separate files, any one of which can die mid-stream.  We gave Orbit Downloader a try to help out and it improved the process somewhat but it is still a pain.   I hope to have it downloaded sometime this morning and then we will see how smoothly the unzipping process goes.  With the 9.2 image I have to re-download multiple sections due to errors.   As soon as I can get it running I will post my thoughts.

UPDATE 1:  The image finally downloaded and we got it all unzipped.  It is running on a Hyper-V server in my office and I finally tried to access it this morning via my hotel internet connection (I am on the road right now).  Didn’t have time to play with it much as the hotel connection was running at about 14.4 baud modem speed but the  opening landing page is total eye candy and will be great for first impressions.  No idea how good the data is yet, hopefully will get some time tomorrow to really dive deep.