So the announcements are starting to flow at TechEd – for instance, Microsoft’s long-awaited master data managment solution, now called Master Data Services, will be available as part of the SQL2008 R2 (what was known as Kilimanjaro) release. More details on this and other BI-related features can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2.aspx
Looks like SSRS will be getting some new stuff – certainly the collaboration features brought in by the 90 Degree Software acquisition look like they’re going to be added to Report Builder. Perhaps we’ll finally see the Officewriter/SSRS functionality too?
UPDATE: one other thing, mentioned by Teo here:
http://prologika.com/CS/blogs/blog/archive/2009/05/11/transmissions-for-teched-usa-2009-day-1.aspx
Gemini will be able to source data from SSRS reports, and SSRS will be able to expose data as ‘data feeds’ (ie have a new RSS/ATOM rendering extension?).
UPDATE #2: Rob Kerr has a very good write-up and analysis of what was shown of Gemini here:
http://www.robkerr.com/post/2009/05/Microsoft-BI—Gemini.aspx
It looks like there’s been the official announcement of a feature I’ve heard rumours about, namely that Gemini will have its own language for defining multidimensional calculations called DAX. As Rob says, it’ll be interesting to see whether it suffers the same fate as that other attempt to simplify MDX, PEL…
So:SQL Server will have meta data management for maintaining hierarchies and dimensionsReporting sits in sharepointAdhoc reporting inside Gemini that will have it\’s own calculation languageSo all we need is to able to submit data from maybe Excel and to wrap the whole lot up in workflow then performance point planning is redundant!When performance planning was killed I had suspicsions that it was because it contradicted the long term road map of Microsoft\’s BI products but they weren\’t willing to say what that road map is. Being able to manage calculations in Excel resolves one of MS\’s the biggest implementation issues with performance point in that you need accountants for this stuff and they all work in Excel.
I think you may be overestimating Microsoft a bit here! And anyway, even if they did have a clever long-term BI strategy, by the time all the components had been released I\’ll have retired…