PowerPivot and Panorama Nova View

Mr. Amir Netz, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, came to lecture about Self - Service BI and Panorama, along with Kobi Averbuch, VP of R&D at Panorama. These are a few of the major points in their lecture:

PowerPivot

IT cannot meet all demands. People will try to find a solution themselves.
We need a technology to bridge the gap.

How to build a PowerPivot application

• We start by installing the PowerPivot add - in.
  PowerPivot runs in - memory using the Vertipaq engine that ensures quick time response.
  All this is without indexing and caching.
• We connect to the various data sources and bring the data into PowerPivot.
• After bringing in the data, we need to connect the different tables we brought into the PowerPivot.

We can use DAX formulas that resemble Excel formulas but have an added power as they can leverage the connection between the tables. PowerPivot also has Time Intelligence functions that don't exist in Excel.
Formatting the final report is as easy as formatting an Excel report.
The target is the information workers that build these days these sort of applications in Excel.
So the first phase is building it with Excel and PowerPivot.

SharePoint Management of the PowerPivot file

The second phase is spreading it to all the workers with SharePoint.
SharePoint is an integral part of PowerPivot. If you want to truly leverage PowerPivot's capabilities and share it with other users - you have to use SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition.

We can then manage the use of the different PowerPivot files on the SharePoint server. We can manage the use of memory on the server, the number of users and queries over time of the different files, the size of the different files and more. We can also look at the specific files details as there is also a report detailing the users that built it, the data sources they use and the top users for the report.  Looking for instance at the reports can help us decide whether we should take the PowerPivot file and turn it into a project in IT (like for instance creating a cube in SSAS). 

We can then let them look at the Excel workbook we created using Excel Services on the web.

Last but not least was shown the PivotViewer, demonstrating the new visual aspects possible in this new tool.

What Panorama Nova View adds to your use of PowerPivot

Data Security Layer - a unified SSAS and PowerPivot security layer on a dimension or member
Domain (AD) and non - domain users can connect to the same model
(The only security offered today for PowerPivot is file security in SharePoint).
Rich data visualizations through the new Flash UI
Additional data formatting
Calculations in MDX on the data
One environment for analysis of all of your data.
Reports and dashboards on all of your data through Panorama Nova View (Dashboard, Analytics, Spotlight).

You have to use SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition for Panorama to be able to connect to PowerPivot as a data source.