On Business Intelligence...

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.

I have recently started to work on Business Intelligence “futures”, or how we sometimes call it, the “BI Labs”. The BI Labs effort has started out of the desire to present our customers with new ideas, in the form of samples/prototypes that gives them a glimpse into the future. As these prototypes are not “products”, they come with no formal documentation, support or anything similar to that so I wanted to compensate that by maintaining a relationship with the customers in the form of a blog.