Well, make sure to come to Dave Wickert and my session for a chance to get a printed copy of this awesome diagram!:

BIN403: PowerPivot for SharePoint Power Hour…so powerful its 75min 7/30 10:30-11:45am, Sheraton Metro B

You’ll also get a chance to win one of two copies of the Professional Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint book as well!

Enjoy and see ya there!

As you may already know from some of the tweets concerning #PowerPivot, the book Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint is now available at Amazon.com.  The book’s authors are Sivakumar Harinath, Ron Pihlgren, and Denny Guang-Yeu Lee (i.e. myself).  Siva and Ron are both long time (this is a good thing) testers with the Analysis Services team.  And myself, well – you already know who I am (just in case you don’t, I’m with SQLCAT specializing in Analysis Services and PowerPivot).

This is an end-to-end book describing all of the moving parts within PowerPivot.  It is written in difficulty order – that is, each chapter is written corresponding from the novice to more advanced concepts.  We cover all the aspects of Excel and DAX – but we also cover the many moving parts concerning SharePoint including: PowerPivot for SharePoint, Excel Services, Geneva / Claims Token,  and Troubleshooting. 

We cover a lot of stuff in this book – so much so that by the time you finish reviewing it, it may actually be possible to understand our vaunted PowerPivot Client/Server Architecture!

I certainly hope you enjoy it!

Happy Reading!

For those of you whom are interested in Health Informatics and the concept of a Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO), the chapter except A RHIO Struggling to Form: Will it Get Off the Ground? from the book Transforming Health Care Through Information: Case Studies is now available.

The chapter definitely covers the issues surrounding technology and how it can be used to help improve healthcare.  But what’s even more interesting is the fact the process, committees, and organizational logistics that is required in order to get this to work.   It’s not just about getting the document standards to talk to each other and the computer systems to actually communicate using the same standards. 

One of the real keys was understanding all of the logistics to get this all to work.  It’s about understanding the politics, stakeholders, trust, leadership, culture, project management, and change management.  It’s about how to setup the teams of doctors, nurses, administrators, and IT personnel to work together and to motivate them to get them to work.  It’s also about how to get them all to communicate. 

Technology can be used to facilitate the communication and simplify the logistics – or it can be used to make things harder.  I hope the book chapter will help you do the former.

But it’s not like I haven’t been tweeting about PowerPivot…thank goodness I can easily retweet or type 140 characters! (follow me @dennylee)

But I do have a good excuse!  Really!

Oh, and for those of you patient enough to read to the end, I do have an interesting sneak peek for you

RTM… aaaaaaahhhhhh!!

RTM is driving me nuts…but then again, Dave Wickert (PowerPivotGeek) has been handling this like a champ (he’s got some great postings on his site: PowerPivotGeek.com, eh?!).  His and my postings are re-posted on PowerPivotTwins.com – the PowerPivotTwins in one place – yay!

Some great ones that you really need to review include:

• A Peek Inside: Allocation. What is it? Why is it important?: This is a really important post because it talks about why you should use the health-based load balancing allocation method.  If you plan to have a lot of users on your PowerPivot for SharePoint environment involving multiple servers – read this posting!
• PowerPivot Component Architecture: As noted in the blog post, this is an excerpt from “Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot Planning and Deployment” whitepaper will be coming out shortly.  Once its published, we’ll point to it from this blog post, SQLCAT.com, PowerPivot blog, etc.  But if you want to understand all of the components within PowerPivot – from Excel Services to the OLE DB Provider for Analysis Services to PowerPivot System Service – here’s the sneak peek, eh?!
• Help: c2wts has fallen and it cannot get up: As noted in the above PowerPivot Component architecture, in order to facilitate communication from PowerPivot System Service to the Analysis Services Engine in VertiPaq mode, we need the Claims to Windows Token Service up and running.  Sometimes c2wts starts up slowly (if its not running, then you will get an Excel Services delegation error); this great post from Dave provides some tips on how to get c2wts working faster.

Writing, Writing, … and Writing

Fair enough, this is just a blatant self promotion here, but I’ve been working nights and weekends with my Analysis Services compatriots Siva Harinath and Ron Pihlgren on our upcoming book: Professional Business Intelligence with PowerPivot for Microsoft Office 2010

Why not pre-order this book and make my publisher happy .    But seriously, we hope this book provides you a great end-to-end picture of PowerPivot, eh?!

Can I blame it on the Apple iPad?

Yes, just like the NY Times, I’ve been drooling over this device over the last month or so.  Perhaps my mind was entranced over the large screen and just how dang cool it looks.  Alas, as amazing as it is – it couldn’t hold me over for a month – geez!  Actually, if you follow me via Twitter or Facebook at all, you’ll probably notice the tweet:

Don’t say I don’t love the game of ultimate frisbee, I chose going to gnarly nines tourney in JeJu (South Korea) over an Apple iPad!

In reality, that’s what’s been driving me nuts – the fact that I had to choose between an ultimate tournament or an Apple iPad…and amazingly, I chose the former.

And here I am in all my (fat) glory hucking a disc – because dang it, I love the game of ultimate.  Enough that the Gnarly Nines tourney in Jeju is holding sway over me even though I’m old, fat, cannot run, frankly untalented….yeah, that just about covers it!

Nah…it was TechReady 10!

Ahh…but for all of you that follow me on FourSquare, perhaps its a different story.  From there, you’ll realize that one of the Microsoft employee conferences we have each year is called TechReady (similar to TechEd – which is New Orleans in June this year) except for employees only and always in Seattle (whew, less flying).

And with all of the Analysis Service AND PowerPivot stuff that we were talking about – that just frankly took the cake and wore me out. 

Well, that’s the sneak peek in store.  If you are fans of the SharePoint Technical diagrams (poster diagrams providing excellent view of SharePoint), well over the next few months – we will be releasing PowerPivot Technical diagrams as well!  I figured I’d jump the punch because there were some postings and questions fielded after TechReady, eh?! 

To infinity…and beyond!

So things are starting to get more normal for me and I’ll start blogging again with all sorts of cool PowerPivot and Analysis Services stuff, eh?!  And as soon as the first of the many PowerPivot Technical Diagrams is ready for your review, we’ll publish them and blog / tweet crazy, eh?!

Enjoy!