Bytes People Solutions, a Microsoft Gold partner for Learning Solutions, has played an active role in SharePoint, Office and SQL training for the past number of years. With the release of the 2010 version of Office and SharePoint as well as SQL 2008R2, this focus will continue and even increase based on demand, according to Madelise Grobler, Managing Director of Bytes People Solutions.
Looking at the products, it is quite clear that the combination of these products will lead to a complete change in the way data is handled and presented.
The success of the Software plus Services strategy relies significantly on the following key data platform requirements, which include storage and search, federation, composition, insight and collaboration, delivery and data programmability.
According to Greg Fibiger, a Product Manager at Bytes People Solutions, they are particularly excited about the development that has taken place within the insight and collaboration space. SQL Server 2008R2 will play an essential role in this regard, as it provides many new features and capabilities for business intelligence users, which can be leveraged by many organisations around the world.
The most promising of the so-called “self-service analyses” features is the introduction of PowerPivot for Excel 2010 and SharePoint that will allow information workers to have access to acres and acres of data via familiar applications such as Excel 2010 or SharePoint.
PowerPivot refers to a collection of applications and services that provide an end-to-end approach for creating data-driven, user-managed business intelligence in Excel Workbooks.
PowerPivot integrates with Excel and SharePoint. In an Excel environment, PowerPivot for Excel provides a familiar authoring and analytical experience on the workstation. In a SharePoint farm, PowerPivot for SharePoint is the set of server-side applications, services, and features that support team collaboration on business intelligence data. SharePoint provides the platform for collaborating and sharing business intelligence across the team and larger organisation. Workbook authors and owners publish and manage the business intelligence that they develop to their SharePoint sites.
With PowerPivot for Excel you can build robust analytical applications, which will provide in-memory, column oriented processing engines to allow users to interactively explore and perform complex calculations on millions of data at lightening speeds. PowerPivot for Excel allows you to import, filter and sort many millions of rows of data, far beyond the one million rows limit in Excel. Using Microsoft Excel 2010, you can easily integrate data from multiple sources such as corporate databases, spreadsheets and external data sources. This “self-service” BI will perform powerful multi-dimensional analysis using Excel techniques and be able to visualise data using enhanced Excel 2010 PivotTables and Pivot Charts.
This means end-users, information workers, knowledge workers - people who currently work in the Excel environment - can use PowerPivot to perform and collaborate on analytic functions without going to a specialist for advice. Now they can serve themselves and build that analysis themselves, and then share it and collaborate on it. PowerPivot provides a layer of administration and manageability that gives power to the end-users to do these analyses.
Mention the word SharePoint and most CIOs, IT managers, knowledge managers and developers with an investment in Microsoft solutions drop what they are doing and are interested.
Whether you agree or disagree with the above statement, it certainly is true that more and more businesses are looking at SharePoint before anything else in the portal space. With more than a 100 million licences and thousands of independent software vendors (ISV) solutions built on the platform it is hard to argue that SharePoint 2007 is anything but successful and of course mainstream.
Following the resounding success of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and on a grander scale Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2007, one has to wonder what's under the covers for SharePoint 2010 that will compel those who have invested in SharePoint 2007 to make the switch, and better yet those who have not, to finally come aboard.
In its current form SharePoint can, among other functions, support a composite application framework, manage document collaboration, manage Web content, manage records and serve as a broad enterprise portal.
To ensure that our clients are exposed to these technologies, Bytes People Solutions will be hosting a number of customer events, including:
* “Demystifying the new features of SharePoint 2010”, presented by Brent Samodien, Product Manager for Development and Portal Solution Training.
* “Understanding the improvement if SQL R2 from a BI perspective”, presented by Greg Fibiger, Product Manager for Database Optimisation.
* “Office 2010 and the impact on the Information Worker”, presented by Carol Lippert and Pieter Nel.
Contact details: Pieter Nel: Business Unit Executive IT Learning Solutions
Tel (011) 205 7000 or e-mail: Pieter.Nel@bytes.co.za
www.bytespeoplesolutions.co.za
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