Microsoft has recently released a new Silverlight control called PivotViewer. This new control helps us to make better use of the growing amounts of information around us by visualizing thousands of things at once in a way that reveals the relationships which connect them. At the heart of the PivotViewer control are “Collections”. They combine large groups of similar items, so we can begin viewing the relationships between individual pieces of information in a new way. By visualizing hidden patterns, PivotViewer enables users to discover and act on new insights.

The Business Intelligence engineering team have prototyped a new concept that couples the PivotViewer control with a utility that uses Reporting Services to automatically generate this type of collections. We showcased this concept at the BI conference in New Orleans with overwhelming support and interest from our community of BI enthusiasts and are making this demo available here to those that would like to evaluate it in their own sandbox environments.

Ted Kummert, Senior Vice President of Business Platform Division has announced the availability of this “concept project” named PivotViewer Extension for Reporting Services within the next 30 days or so. It will be just a preview, and won’t be supported product or feature of Microsoft Business Intelligence. As such, it may not work perfectly under all conditions. We look forward to your feedback and participation in this experiment and will continue working hard to bring cutting edge visualization technologies like PivotViewer to you as fast as possible. And I will maintain connection with you, the customers, via this blog, to get the feedback about this project.

We’re working out the final details for making it available. Until then, stay tuned and review the video fragments from the Teched Keynote (from offset 1h:10m or so) and from the BI Conference Keynote (from offset 1h:21m or so).