By now you’ve probably already seen that the new Office Store, where you can get hold of apps for Office and Sharepoint, is now open. If you haven’t, check out the following blog posts:
http://blogs.office.com/b/office-next/archive/2012/08/06/introducing-apps-for-the-new-office-and-sharepoint-and-the-office-store.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeapps/archive/2012/08/06/173-173-the-office-store-is-now-open.aspx
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/07/microsoft_apps_for_office/
The implications for BI are obvious: new apps for data visualisation (along the lines of what’s available in Sparklines for Excel maybe; perhaps also the long-lost decomposition tree from Proclarity?), analysis, importing and exporting data. I’ve already downloaded and had a play with the Bubbles app, which is quite fun:
Will it take off? Who knows; it’ll certainly be a while before enough people are on Office 2013 before we can tell. Will anyone want to pay for apps? Again, who knows – I wonder if we’ll see something similar to OLAP PivotTable Extensions appear, and if free, open source apps will kill the paid app market at least in some areas? If you’ve got any ideas for a BI-related app, please leave a comment!
Nuget for Office, anyone? 🙂