Category Archives: PASS

Modern Reporting with SSRS 2016 & 2017, and Report Tool Options – PASS Sessions

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It’s official.  The PASS Summit schedule was announced and I will be doing three sessions:  A full-day preconference, a regular session and a panel discussion with other industry professionals.  Come back to this post for follow-up information and selections of content from these sessions after the event.

The PASS Summit is my favorite event of the year and I always leave with so much valuable insight and information.  PASS is my annual battery recharge for the rest of the year.  It is a vibrant community of professionals and industry leaders who love to share and exchange learnings.  Not just an opportunity to attend sessions presented by top-notch experts and product owners from Microsoft but Summit presents many real opportunities to sit and talk, meet and socialize with these industry influencers.  My perspectives change and I go back to my clients, classrooms and projects with solutions and a fresh new approach.  I’ve been going to the PASS Summit for twelve years and every year is literally the best Summit ever.  In the industry, there is no better investment of time and energy compared with what you will gain by attending.  I look forward to meeting many of you at Summit.  Please introduce yourself and say ‘Hello’.

My session descriptions are following.  It was an honor to be selected to present a full-day preconference session.  Thanks to the program committee for this great privelege!

Modern Reporting with SQL Server 2016 and 2017 Reporting Services
The full-day preconference session is on Tuesday, October 31, 2017 from 8:30 to 4:30.

The 2016 product release was a big upgrade that, once again, brought SSRS into center stage as a market-leading reporting and dashboard design tool for operational and BI reporting.  The big news was that SSRS reports truly run in all modern web browsers and work on mobile devices and all desktops in a new modern web portal.  The introduction of Mobile Reports, formerly known as Datazen, gives mobile device users interactive, tactile and actionable dashboard style reporting on all the popular mobile smartphones and tablets.  The 2017 product brings even more goodness with the integration of Power BI Report Server, on-premises Power BI report integration in a cloud-free platform.  Join Paul for a full-day pre-conference session where you will explore new capabilities and learn to integrate modern reporting into your data platform.

The Data Visualization Panel Discussion is on Wednesday, November 1, 2017 at 4:45 PM.  This is a 75 minute session.  Join Mico Yuk, Ginger Grant, Meagan Longoria, Chris Webb and myself for an engaging discussion about data visualization tools, choices and challenges.

Your Complete BI Toolbelt: Using Power BI, Excel & SSRS Together to Create Integrated BI Solutions
This is also a 75 minute session on Thursday, November 2nd, 2017 at 10:45.

How do you choose the right reporting tool for the job? Everyone knows that Power BI brings kick-butt visuals and interactions but it doesn’t do multi page reports for print, Excel dishes meat and potato financial sheets and pivot reports but they always look like, well, spreadsheets; and of course our old friend Reporting Services delivers highly-formatted, multi-page reports but it just doesn’t look good in yoga pants anymore. Can we use these tools together? You bet your sweet patootie, we can. Come and learn how to choose the right tool for the job. I will show you how to orchestrate beautiful business solutions by stitching these bad boys together using actions and drill-through navigation…. and maybe a few tricks you haven’t seen before.

Modern Reporting with SQL Server 2016 and 2017 Reporting Services full day pre-conference session

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I am thrilled to be presenting a full-day preconference session before the PASS Summit, on October 31st.  Please join me for a deep tour of the new capabilities and BI platform integrations for SQL Server Reporting Services 2016 & 2017.  The session will also review the essential skills and tasks to setup and configure the report server and web portal, report design and modern report solution planning.

Here’s an overview of the session:

The 2016 product release was a big upgrade that, once again, brought SSRS into center stage as a market-leading reporting and dashboard design tool for operational and BI reporting.  The big news was that SSRS reports truly run in all modern web browsers and work on mobile devices and all desktops in a new modern web portal.  The introduction of Mobile Reports, formerly known as Datazen, gives mobile device users interactive, tactile and actionable dashboard style reporting on all the popular mobile smartphones and tablets.  The 2017 product brings even more goodness with the integration of Power BI Report Server, on-premises Power BI report integration in a cloud-free platform.  Join Paul for a full-day pre-conference session where you will explore new capabilities and learn to integrate modern reporting into your data platform.

This session covers:

  • What’s new in Reporting Services 2017 (and 2016)?
  • Reporting Services and Power BI Report Server Architecture
  • Parameter improvements
  • Overview of report solution design general best practices
  • Integrating and managing Power BI on-premises
  • Integrating SSRS with the Power BI service
  • Graphical report design
  • Visualization choices
  • Chart visual types and new visual options
  • Indicators and sparklines
  • Creating dashboard reports
  • Advanced and analytic reporting
  • Advanced design techniques
  • Conditional visibility & drill-down
  • Pagination & flow control
  • Error management
  • Drill-through navigation
  • Query design beyond the basics
  • Reporting with SQL Server and Analysis Services
  • Using the DAX and MDX query editors
  • Analytical and Business intelligence reporting
  • Managing report projects and consolidating reports
  • Upgrading from prior versions of SSRS
  • Framing and integrating reports the easy way
  • Introducing Mobile Reports
  • Multi-device mobile reporting, business cases & scenarios
  • Visual control categories & behavior
  • Mobile reports and parameters
  • Filtering an navigating mobile reports
  • Building mobile report solutions
  • Mobile drillthrough – targeting mobile reports and paginated reports
  • Content management
  • Managing the web portal
  • SSRS and Power BI Report Server administration
  • Custom branding
  • Instance caching
  • Server management and configuration

Register for the PASS Summit and preconference here.  Also, look out for a sneak peek of this and many other sessions in the 24 Hours Of PASS which will run continuously through July 19th and 20th.  Watch the PASS Learning Channel for announcements.

PASS Business Analytics Conference Hands-on Micro Workshop

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I’m jumping on a plane bound for San Jose, California today headed to the PASS Business Analytics Conference (BAC).  If you plan to attend my hands-on workshop, Tuesday at 2:00, the following information will help you prepare:

Bring your laptop
running Windows 7, 8 or 10.  Power BI will work, at minimum, on Windows 7 32 bit with 4 GB of RAM.  A 64-bit OS with more RAM is better but not required.  When you install Power BI Desktop on Windows 7, you may be instructed to install the .NET Framework 4.5.  Please do this ahead of time.

Install Power BI Desktop
Just go to PowerBi.com and install it from the Products menu.  You don’t need an account to install Power BI Desktop.

Charge your laptop battery
We will be meeting in a standard session room in the afternoon without additional power.  Plan to spend the two hours running on battery power (and don’t use up your battery charge earlier in the day).  I don’t have control over the schedule or meeting room facilities so please plan ahead.  We also won’t have control of the wireless Internet connectivity which I hope to use to provide files and exercise instructions.  Just in case of connection issues, I will provide files on USB drives.

If you do not yet have a subscription setup at PowerBI.com, that’s OK.  In this shorter version of the workshop, we will spend most of the time working offline.  If you do have a subscription, you can publish and work with the online features but this is not a requirement.

Really looking forward to seeing you there!

Get To Know D&B MVPs and SQL Server MVPs

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Last year Dun and Bradstreet, the world’s leading business data authority, recruited leading SQL Server MVPs to help their customers integrate business solutions using D&B services, and conducted a set of video interviews with 18 members of the MVP program community at the PASS Global Summit in Seattle.  Details about the program are on the D&B MVP Program web site here.  Many of these fine people are trusted friends, associates, and long-time members of the outstanding SQL Server community. Following is an excerpt of the announcement on the D&B MVP Program web site:

Posted by Kim Schmidt 5votes on December 19, 2014

Each year the Professional Association of SQL Server (PASS) Experts holds their annual SQL PASS Conference. This year it was held Nov. 3rd and 4th for Pre-Conference Sessions and officially the conference ran from Nov. 5th through the 7th in Seattle, WA.

We hired a professional Hollywood Videographer to tape interviews of as many of our D&B MVPs that we could, so you could "get to know them better" both in their areas of expertise as well as in their role as a D&B MVP. We taped 18 of our current 42 D&B MVPs.

I truly hope you watch this video series, even one per night (each one is between 5-9 minutes long). It will show you the collective intelligence we have in our MVPs, it will show you their fun and personable personalities, and tell you how you can contact them online.

If you are looking for the industry top experts to help with data management, Business Intelligence, problem-solving or how to use any of the business data integration services from Dun & Bradstreet, these are the people to go to.

Here are the D&B MVPs (and two others) that were interviewed that day, in the order of the video series:

D&B MVP Program Manager Kim Schmidt

D&B MVP Argenis Fernandez

D&B MVP Karen Lopez

D&B MVP Mark Tabladillo

D&B MVP Stacia Misner

D&B MVP Kevin Kline

D&B MVP Ryan McKnight

D&B MVP Tamera Clark

D&B MVP Thomas LaRock

D&B MVP Paul Turley

D&B MVP Tim Radney

D&B MVP Joey D’Antoni

D&B MVP Arnie Rowland

D&B MVP Andy Leonard

D&B MVP Denny Cherry

D&B MVP Jose Chinchilla

D&B MVP Kendal Van Dyke

D&B MVP Tim Ford

D&B MVP Luis Figueroa

Davide Mauri of Italy