Mobile Reporting with the Microsoft Platform

What’s Microsoft’s strategy for reporting capabilities on mobile devices?

SQL Server 2012 has been "released to manufacturing".  For those of you who may find this phrase confusing it means that the product is completed and they’re burning the disks, stuffing the boxes, training the tech support engineers and getting ready to make it available to download around the beginning of April.

This new version brings a lot of new capabilities but one of the most visible will be a new generation of business intelligence reporting.  I’ve had visibility to these new features for about two years now and there is some exciting stuff coming.  Business Intelligence is a very competitive industry and there are several industry offerings.  Most of them are very vertical, proprietary and expensive to implement.  Even though Microsoft has been a little behind the curve, a lot of smart people are anxiously awaiting SQL Server 2012 because it offers what no other vendor can offer: a holistic platform with intuitive tools that people either already know how to use or will be able to pick up very quickly.

In a nutshell, here’s what you should know about the new Microsoft BI platform:

• The Microsoft BI platform is an investment.  There’s some really good stuff coming in SQL Server that integrates with SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition but it’s just the first wave.  In this release we will see:
  • Power Pivot v2 with several design interface and usability enhancements.  The Power Pivot model designer is available as a free downloadable add-in for Excel 2010.  Power Pivot models are fully-integrated with SharePoint, and can be used as shared data sources for other tools that work with Analysis Services.
  • BI Semantic Tabular Models.  This is essentially Power Pivot for the enterprise.  Models are either imported from Excel Power Pivot workbooks or authored in the new Visual Studio 2010-based SQL Server Data Tools (replacement fro BIDS) that installs with SQL Server 2012.  Tabular models are deployed to a special instance of SQL Server Analysis Services on a database server. 

Roadmap for mobile reporting:   http://aka.ms/alyovw

Using SharePoint Insights on iPad / Safari:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/library/hh697482.aspx