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Conferences Been to and Going to

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A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend my first Microsoft TechEd which was held on the Gold Coast. It was a great event and just as good for networking and catching up with friends and acquaintances from all parts of the Microsoft World.
My key take away from the 3 day event was about the 2010 platform. Consisting of Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Exchange 2010. These 5 products together are fantastic – it’s like Microsoft have been playing up until now, and these products are the real deal. However, that comes with one big caveat. They rock becuase they all work so well together. So don’t expect to install Office 2010 and have some of the cool new features in Outlook, because they don’t work without Exchange 2010. So with this in mind, I think it is a tough ask to have businesses upgrade their whole business platform all at once (not to mention the cool Dev tools of Visual Studio 2010 also). I hope businesses do come on board with this, because there is so much benefit in the whole platform, but I think it will be a while.

The SharePoint 2010 launch is happening in October in Las Vegas (which I sadly won’t be attending), so I can’t wait to see what excellent features will be in the new version.

However, the conference that I am attending very soon is Web Directions South 2009 on October 8 and 9 in Sydney. This is the premier Web Industry event and I previously attedned in 2007 and can’t wait to see how much I learn at this event.

Free Online Training Resources for Microsoft Products

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Now that I have some time on my hands I need to take advantage of some of the free online training that is available for Microsoft Products.

Next week, there is some great online training for Microsoft CRM. See the details on Catherine Eibner’s blog here. There is also some excellent free face to face Microsoft CRM training in early May in Sydney. See the details on Chris Auld’s blog here.

Then there is the fantastic series of free online courses from Microsoft called Ramp Up. The courses include the following topics:

  • SharePoint for Developers – Part 1
  • SharePoint for Developers – Part 2
  • Visual Studio 2008
  • For the VS 2002/2003 Developer: Learn VS 2005
  • For the VB 6.0 Developer: Learn VB 2005
  • For the Java Developer: Learn .NET
  • Developer Basics

There is also a lot of Microsoft Software that you can try for free – details are here. This is from a great post by David Lean about lots of free stuff you can get from Microsoft.

For SharePoint specifically, SharePoint Designer 2007 is now available as a free download, plus there are some training video’s available also here.  And if you want to try out SharePoint there is a pre-configured SharePoint VHD available for download here.

I’m sure this is not a comprehensive list, but it’s the ones that I’m going to start with now.

Demo’s {almost didn’t} happen here

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Last week I completed my entry into the Microsoft Demo’s Happen Here competition. Wow what a big job it was to actually get that entry completed and submitted! I almost gave up, but I had such wonderful help to get the demo done, that in the end I had no excuse but to complete it and get it submitted.

So Demo’s Happen Here is a Microsoft Competition to promote the new 2008 products of Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio. The idea was to do a demo of a new feature in one of these products and present it to a user group and submit a video of the presentation on-line.

I didn’t have a great urge to enter but then my user group, Sydney Business and Technology User Group (SBTUG) were having a Demo Fest where a number of people were all going to do a presentation, so I sort of half heartedly said I would do one… and then I won an eval copy the software that evening so I had no excuse… The other reason for entering is that Catherine had done an excellent job of her first entry into the comp and I thought that there needs to be more geek girls entering the competition.

The first thing I did wrong is I left it all too late! The Saturday before the demo fest on the Wednesday I attempted to install the software. For some reason SQL Server would just not install on my Vista PC (it would not install the services, which from google searching seemed to be an issue with Administration rights but I tried 4 different ways and could not get it working). So for most of Saturday and Sunday I was just reasearching and preparing my script and slides.

My next step was to get a copy of a pre-configured Virtual Hard Disk to run in a Virtual PC. I’ve never used a VPC before so I did not want to attempt to create and install one myself, and as I was only needing SQL server for the hour or so to test and record my demo it did not seem worth it to build one myself.

My first attempt to get a copy of the VHD failed as it was an old VHD from the original Hero’s Happen here presentations and it would not install as it was Time-Bombed. That was Sunday night.

Monday night I picked up a copy of a VHD on DVD. When I got home the DVD failed and would not install.

So, despite all our best efforts and wonderful help from a wonderful friend, I could not get anything working and was just about to call it quits when another wonderful twitter friend offered to build a VHD for me and lend me a portable hard disk. I picked that up on Tuesday evening and hey presto, it installed first time!

Now I had no excuses and had to finalise my SQL script and presentation and record it. I used the fantastic tool Community Clips from Microsoft Labs to record it. Wow, doing the demo for recording was sooo difficult. I had about 6 false starts – would get tounge tied about 2 mins in and then have to stop and start over… eventually I realised there is no way I would be able to do it in 1 take and it was getting late. So I would just pause and re-start the sentence again if I got stuck.

Then I had a lot of editing to do and boy, it is really horrible having to listen to your own voice over and over and over again. The recording is terrible, I really sound like I have a speach impediment. So much stuttering and so many ummm’s it’s unbeleivable. But but this stage I was so over it and just wanted to get it done… AND I still had to present it the next evening at the User Group

The next hurdle was getting the demo uploaded to the competition site… what a painful and slow process that was. I had to google search to find out that I had to disable Silverlight to upload the video to the Silverlight website – WOW! So that took about another hour or so – another late night.

On Wednesday evening when I finally did my presentation I was much more relaxed and it went much much better with a lot less hesitation in my voice. (@Rog42 secretly videoed it which I have not had the courage to look at yet).

So for posterity’s sake here is a link to the demo… but I really don’t recommend you watch it – it’s not really that interesting, and does not sound very good at all.

However, the SBTUG’s Demo Fest was fantastic and there were 5 other excellent presentations and overall the night was a great success, so I hope we do something like that again – maybe a yearly event?

And I learned a lot from the whole experience. Be prepared early; relax; it does’t have to be perfect; Just Do It!; I’m much much much better in front of a live audience; and most importantly, friends are wonderful and will help!

I would like to do some more presentation stuff because I realised I’m so out of practice with it and it is something I love doing when I’m finally in front of the audidence, but it’s just the prepartion that sucks big time!

PerformancePoint Opportunities?

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I went along to the Microsoft BI summit last week because I was interested in seeing what the new Microsoft BI offering PerformancePoint is all about. I came out of the day thinking, wow, I think I know what I would like to do for a job now. PerformancePoint has some really compelling points but I still have some underlying doubt about the whole area of business acceptance of the PerformancePoint product.

Now I’m not saying here that I’m a PerformancePoint expert, far from it – but I am interested in learning about it and I have some solid technical and business skills which combined can be useful for working with PerformancePoint. Also, I still have a number of questions about how PerformancePoint works, so some of the information below may not be 100% right, but that’s why I’m taking some time to learn about the product.

What would be the compelling reason for a business to start using PerformancePoint? I think businesses would only be interested in PerformacePoint if they already had SQL server, already had a cube built and were already looking at one of the other BI suites such as Cognos or Hyperion.

Whilst PerformancePoint may be significantly cheaper than the competitors (I don’t know this for a fact, it’s just what they said on the day) it is still a hefty price because of all the prerequisites. You have to have SQL Server Enterprise Edition (including SSAS and SSRS), Office 2007 and SharePoint – I looks like you can get away with WSS 3.0 as a minimum but I reckon companies are going to need MOSS Enterprise Edition with Office 2007 to really get the most out of this because they will surely want to use Excel Services at some time to do some of the complex calculations to go into the Performance Point dashboards. Here is a link to the prerequisites page on the PerformancePoint server site. All of these software components together is a significant investment in licences alone.

However, it’s not just licencing costs; most companies don’t know how to build complex systems like these themselves. To get the most out of PerformancePoint a company will need a Cube built, which needs a big SQL Server database behind it, and significant time and effort, probably by an external consultant. Then they need to create the scorecards and dashboards in PerformancePoint (a scorecard is an element of a dashboard). Whilst Microsoft have made the Dashboard Designer part of Office 2007 so that power users can use it, it still will need a very experienced IT literate person to build the scorecards and dashboards and get it all working (that’s me by the way). Then if they are going to display it on MOSS, or even WSS then they will probably want to utilise all the other features of MOSS and create an intranet site also – so they will need someone to build their SharePoint site (again, me).

Lets just assume for now that MS are right, that the software is significantly more cost effective than the competitors (and the consulting would probably be a lot cheaper than the competitors also). Then this means that there is a significant market segment of businesses who would not have done any form of scorecarding before but now they have the tools at their reach and at a realistic cost. Previously BI/Scorecarding has been just for the big business, due to the huge costs involved, but now it can be available to the medium size business – the ones who really need it – the ones who run their whole business on cobbled together excel spreadsheets that just get re-hashed month after month.

For the business to get the most out of the whole process they will need to have a very good relationship between the IT department and the business units and also very good integration between the different business units. Implementing a PerformancePoint solution will definitely need a business champion at the executive level of the business to get all the business units on board, and then a full time coordinator looking after the IT/Business integration side and working with the external consultants (again, a role I can do quite well).

The risk is that a “rogue” business unit will just decide that the way they do things is too different than the rest of the business and that their data does not fit into the cookie cutter approach that management are taking, so they will just continue to do their own spreadsheets the way they have always done, because that’s what they know and trust. A PerformancePoint Solution will not work if it does not have full integration from all business units. Apparently PerformancePoint handles exceptions quite well, so hopefully these objections can be overcome, (again, where I can help) with the support from the management’s champion. PerformancePoint is basically just fancy spreadsheets where the data is stored in the database to make it all uniform and controlled.

If PerformancePoint is allowed to be used by the business and is NOT hijacked by the IT department then it will work really well – it brings the business reporting BACK to the business rather than it being a difficult IT Function. I think it was really smart of Microsoft to position the Dashboard designer as part of Office. However, it does need good support from IT, which brings it back to needing good business and IT integration.

At the BI summit, MS showed a case study of a business using the earlier software that PerformancePoint was based on – it was a Hospital (a bit different to the usual Microsoft demo of AdventureWorks or the Alpine Ski House sample that comes with PerformancePoint). The case study was excellent, they showed how they made the software fit their business.

I think that a majority of real life businesses, once they get a hold of PerformancePoint will not use the red, yellow and green stop light indicators, at least initially, because they are not what they are used to. The hospital case study showed that they created “scorecards” that looked exactly like their previous profit reports – a really good use of the software. This shows the business that they can get the benefit out of PerformancePoint such as improving productivity in collecting and reporting on the information, without having to significantly change the content and look of the existing reports. That way the business can get used to the system and then evolve the way the reports look over time, and maybe then add some stoplight functionality.

I would love to work on implementing PerformancePoint either from within a company or working for a consultant that a company engages to do the implementation. I can see me being the business analyst that liaises between the financial controller, the heads of departments and the IT department, to translate between them. I can analyse what the existing financial reporting is, then translate that into the scorecards and dashboards required for PerformancePoint, bringing the data in from either an existing cube or other Line of Business systems. I can also build and run the SharePoint site for the business if required.

I can utilise my existing IT skills with databases and SQL along with my business skills and understanding of financial and business reporting to help businesses improve their existing reporting into the structured system that Microsoft PerformancePoint is.

Now I just need to find out what companies in Australia are implementing PerformancePoint or what consultants are going to be selling their PerformancePoint skills. If anyone knows of any company I can contact about working for them with PerformancePoint please let me know via email jminers at gmail dot com.