I’m not at TechEd so this is second-hand news, but two big announcements: first of all, the first public CTP of Katmai is available for download on Connect; secondly, and more interestingly, a deal has been done where Microsoft has licensed Dundas’ data visualisation components. Russell Christopher has the best breakdown of this deal I’ve seen so far here:
He’s right in wondering whether the OLAP component is part of this deal – that’s the big question from the AS point of view.
UPDATE: see Russell’s comment below – the OLAP components (http://www.dundas.com/Products/Chart/NET/OLAP/index.aspx) are part of the deal! For me, the obvious use is as a replacement for OWC, not just instead BI Development Studio but as a free component that anyone developing a thick/thin client for Analysis Services can use. Next question: does licensing the components mean that Microsoft can now give them away for free like this? Or can it only use them embedded in its own products?
Good news, the OLAP components are part of the deal, but who knows where & when they\’re going to be exposed. The next bit is purely conjecture on my part, but it seems the most logical place to surface this stuff would be PerformancePoint. However, then you need to look at the overlap of features between Dundas and ProClarity web….
Should simplify life for Reporting Services adopters – for example, a basic feature like dual-y-axis-scales is still missing in the base product (basic, but a show-stopper for business analysts with existing Excel charts!). Since I\’m struggling with a Dundas Map eval these days, what would be most intriguing to me would be seamless integration of the new SQL Server 2008 spatial data type (apparently not yet included in CTP\’s) with both SSAS and SSRS/Dundas Map…
– Deepak