What if you could harness the power of such technological developments such as in-memory computing, real-time data analysis and high powered data visualisation tools? Well that is what many large enterprises have been doing in recent times and deriving significant business insights as a result.
Microsoft has made available Power BI for Office 365 that brings together all of those capabilities for non-database admins and those who do not call themselves data scientists.
Power BI for Office 365 is part of the Office 365 ProPlus package. The service combines the capabilities of Excel 2013 to parse data and provide the basis for further analysis and sharing with Power BI.
Microsoft said that Excel is such a ubiquitous tool that there was no need to develop a custom module for Power BI. Building on this familiarity, Excel can be used to draw in and parse data sources for Power BI to then further manipulate and present.
As part of a demonstration, Excel was used in Office 365 to pull in publically available data sources and perform analysis and visualisation operations. In this case, the city of New York has a civic service whereby people can report problems with buildings and services, the 311 line. The data has a geospatial element allowing Excel to overlay the data of calls for everything from heating failures to refuse issues and street condition, on maps to see distribution and frequency information.
With the raw data organised in this way, Power BI can then take it and perform more complex visualisation operations and use the Office 365 cloud capabilities to make the data available for presentation and collaboration to almost anyone, anywhere on any web connected device. There is a mobile app available for Power BI, but the charts and graphs are rendered in HTML5 meaning the widest possible number of devices are catered for.
The power of the service is in its ability to pull information, in many forms, from many sources, but also the ability update from those sources too.
An organisation’s IT department can make data sets available internally, through files or connectors, but there is also a Microsoft maintained index of publically available data sets, which is searchable directly through Excel and Power BI. Enterprise customers get an enhanced corporate version of this Data Catalogue too. The IT department can manage the sources through a data management gateway, setting permissions, availability, refresh times and more.
“The end user can interact with the data directly, yet IT can still curate the data to ensure that end-users are accessing the right data,” said Eron Kelly, corporate vice president and director SQL Server marketing, Microsoft.
Perhaps the most powerful feature for the non-data scientist in Power BI is the ability to query data through natural language questions. This allows the user to ask specific questions which the built in intelligence can then turn into queries and views to further enhance the value of the data available.
While Excel is a powerful tool to gather data directly and do the initial slice and dice, Power BI for Office 365 can also work directly with data files, such as can be made available through the data management gateway.
The service has been in beta for some time now, and the official release brings with it a number of new capabilities, not least of which is the ability to connect to a number of new data formats, including blob and table storage in the Microsoft Windows Azure cloud service, but also data in Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange.
Microsoft said that by bringing together its enterprise cloud and Office assets, it has developed an “industry-leading business intelligence solution that gives people a powerful new way to work with data in the tools they use every day, Excel and Office 365. With Power BI for Office 365 you can easily deploy a cloud-based BI environment for users to share those insights and collaborate from anywhere.”
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