Recently I came across a problem with an Analysis Services data connection when I was trying to create a status indicator in SharePoint 2010 (formerly known as a key performance indicator in SharePoint 2007). I had successfully created the data connection in Excel, verified that I could create a PivotTable with it, and then saved [...]

TechNet is publishing a series of four articles introducing readers to business intelligence. I have written two of these articles while a friend of mine, Derek Comingore of BI Voyage, has written one of them. The fourth article is not yet written, but I’ll post a link here when it becomes available. A lot of [...]

Life as an independent consultant is interesting and challenging, but it gets a little lonely in the sense that you don’t spend a lot of time with your industry peers. That’s why I enjoy getting out to conferences each year. I always run into people I know and admire and get to pick their brains on [...]

Another session I did at PASS addressed data mining. Here are the steps I followed during the demonstration and the view I added to the AdventureWorksDW database: Data Mining for the Rest of Us. You will need access to Analysis Services 2005 (either on your own machine or on your network) and you will need [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I delivered a presentation at PASS 2007 entitled “Searching Business Intelligence Data in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.” The steps to configure the environment correctly are considerable and difficult to represent with enough detail in PowerPoint slides, so I promised the audience not to sweat the details in note-taking and [...]