As you might have seen, this Monday the Microsoft BI team announced Power BI on WPC. Power BI for Office 365 is a new self-service business intelligence (BI) solution delivered through Excel and Office 365. It contains Power Pivot (observe the space ..), Power View, Power Query (project Data Explorer), Power Map (project GeoFlow), Q & A that you get access to with certain Office 365 subscriptions delivered into Excel and Office 365.
Check out the demo with all the features from Amir Netz on stage at WPC here:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jsa-5LGx_IY
Some other brand new capabilities include:
- A Data Management Gateway which enables IT to build connections to on-premise data sources and schedule refreshes. Business users always have the most up to date reports, whether on their desktop or over their device.
- BI Sites, dedicated workspaces optimized for BI projects, which allow business users to quickly find and share data and reports with colleagues and collaborate over BI results.
- Real-time access to BI Sites and data no matter where a user is located via mobile devices. Customers can access their data through the browser in HTML5 or through touch-optimized mobile applications for Windows 8, Windows RT, Surface and iPad devices.
- A natural language query experienced called Q&A which allows users to ask questions of their data and receive immediate answers in the form of an interactive table, chart or graph.
- New capabilities which allow more active users or data stewards to manage and monitor the data views created for their individual and team’s analysis.
This is a very big release where for the first time several groups inside Microsoft across different units (Office and Server and Tools) release a single product that deliver awesome value to billion Office users. If you are as excited as we are, the public preview of Power BI for Office 365 will be available this summer. You can sign up now at www.office.com/powerbi to be notified when the preview is available.
Some further reading:
- Introduction on SQL Server blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2013/07/08/introducing-power-bi-for-office-365.aspx
- Announcement on Office News blog: http://blogs.office.com/b/office-news/archive/2013/07/08/announcing-power-bi-for-office-365.aspx
- Feature summary on Office Tech blog: http://blogs.office.com/b/office365tech/archive/2013/07/08/what-powers-power-bi-in-office-365.aspx
Very nice article, I used some of your useful concepts to write my own article: Self-Service Business Intelligence and Natural Language Reporting. I’d love to get your feedback. Don’t you think that Natural Language Business Intelligence is the next step of Business Intelligence’s evolution?