The SQL Server magazine has posted an interview with Microsofts Donald Farmer, a great interview. It explains how PowerPivot (called Gemini in the post) will affect the end users and what the reason for existence is for PowerPivot and how it will affect us BI consultants, even with some Real world samples. A great piece of info i was really waiting for.
A small excerpt:
SQL Server Magazine: How exactly are the services managed? And what does that mean for IT and end users?
Farmer: Let’s start with the story of one of the founding legends of Gemini: We were visiting a customer—a freight company. Somebody whispered in the IT manager’s ear, “You need to come and deal with a problem.” So the IT manager left for about an hour. The problem was that the cargo validation application had failed. What’s the cargo validation application? The IT manager had never heard of it. It turns out that this was a mission-critical application. Every cargo manager in the company was using it. The IT manager didn’t know it existed. Why not? It was an Excel spreadsheet. Somebody had built this application and shared it with other cargo managers. Soon every cargo manager in the organization had it. In fact, they wouldn’t ship a piece of cargo without it. And yet IT didn’t know it existed.
Gemini gives end users the power to build analytic applications, but when they deploy, share, and collaborate, IT can see what’s happening. IT will see the usage of any application that someone in the organization publishes. They’ll understand who published it, what the internals of that application are, what data sources it uses, and who else is using it. They’ll understand that it’s mission-critical. So IT understands that this is something they need to manage and control. But also maybe it’s something they need to secure, validate, and audit.
Read the entire article here: http://www.sqlmag.com/Articles/ArticleID/102613/pg/1/1.html