TechFuse 2010 Follow-up

This past week I spoke at TechFuse 2010 in Bloomington, MN.  There were approximately 400 people in attendance and for my session I had 50 to 60 people which was really good since there were seven different tracks to attend.  I did have a little scare with my virtual environment performance the night before and the morning of the event, but I was able to resolve it just before I headed out to the event. 

My talk was to discuss all of the Microsoft Business Intelligence components and try and shed some light on how they all fit together and can be used to create a unified dashboard.  Hopefully I was able to accomplish some of my goal, it was rather aggressive to try and do in 75 minutes and I could have definitely used more time since I had demos.  You have to have demos for a tech focused event and I did two samples with Report Builder 2.0 (one relational and the other multi-dimensional), one with Excel Services (PivotTable), and the final one was using Dashboard Designer to create the SharePoint PerformancePoint Dashboard.  Here was my final result that combined all of the pieces together:

Granted it is a little busy, but with my time constraint I just wanted to show how it could be done and not necessarily how pretty you could make it, just that you can use all of the different pieces for different effects and the end-user doesn’t need to know what technology was even used. 

• In the scorecard I added an MDX formula for the Order Quantity target which states that they wanted a 15% growth over same time previous period,
• linked the measures in the scorecard to the analytical chart below the scorecard,
• created a matrix report with an embedded line chart to create a sparkline trend for sales,
• used the SSRS 2008 gauge to show gross profit margin KPI from the SSAS cube (added ranges to create the red/yellow/green and associated with goal value),
• used an Excel PivotTable with filters and conditional formatting,
• and then the two filters on the dashboard page that were linked to the different components.

For my data sources I used the Adventure Works 2008 databases.  I have included my demo files along with my presentation in the download link below.  The demo files include a ReadMe.txt file that provides the links to the database downloads along with some additional notes, the SQL script for the view I used for my SSRS matrix report, the two RDL files, the Excel file, the dashboard.master page I used, and the bswx Dashboard file.  If you have any questions in regards to the demo or follow-up in regards to my presentation feel free to leave a comment on the posting or send me a direct message.

Thanks to everyone that attended my session and now I am getting ready for my next one, ‘Lower Costs Through BI Consolidation’ at the SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch in Bloomington, MN next week.  I also get to start out the event doing the welcome and introduction of the keynote speakers.  Once that is done it is on to the next presentation at the PASSMN May 18, 2010 Monthly Meeting where I will be talking about ‘SSAS Design Best Practices & Incremental Processing’.

Download: