Marco Russo, lucky guy, was at the PDC and saw the session on Office 12 BI. I’ve had a Google and can’t find anyone else with more details – if any of you did see this presentation, leave a comment and tell me what you thought!
It sounds like the Office guys have finally turned Excel into a useable BI platform, and this will be an additional squeeze on all those small Excel addin vendors out there. The integration with the new Excel server bits that Marco hints at would be the real killer – I have often had BI users wanting to take their worksheet full of OLAP data and publish it to the web as a live report.
Chris, there was a brief demo of Excel 12 integration with OLAP at last week\’s SQL PASS Conference as well – plenty of server-side formatting, Data Analyzer and Excel Add-In features. But they said that MDX queries could only be viewed, not hand-crafted, so there may still be niches for 3rd-party add-ins.The other interesting feature was deeper integration of Reporting Services with SharePoint, with storage of report defintionss and delivery of reports to DocLibs. These are mentioned in Brian Welcker\’s presentation:http://ew.sqlpass.org/ew/pass/callpapers/attach/PASS_106M_End_to_End_Part_3.zip – Deepak