Power Map Updates

Microsoft just announced on the Power BI blog that the April update for Power Map is available for all Office 365 subscribers. This update adds the capability to add sound to any Power Map videos you export out of Power Map. They have also added some Geocoding updates that are detailed on the blog post as well.

The biggest change that is mentioned is that the Power Map Preview that has been available as a separate download for Excel 2013 will no longer expire on May 31, 2014! They plan to put out an updated version of this standalone add-in that will not expire in May. They are still recommending that this add-in not be used in production environment, but this does give you the capability to use Power Map without an Office 365 account in Excel 2013. Not sure what this means feature wise for Power Map Preview, my guess is that they will not keep it up-to-date, for that you will have to get an Office 365 subscription (highly recommended by me, as I have the Home subscription that allows for 5 desktop installs along with 5 tablet and the new iPad versions of Excel, Word and PowerPoint).

Power BI for Office 365

Sorry, I'm a little late with putting up this announcement, but I was really busy today so this is the first chance I have had to put up my thoughts on the new Microsoft Office BI announcement from the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Houston today.

For those that have not heard, Microsoft just turned the whole BI (Business Intelligence) world on it's head! First there were a couple of preview products that now have new official names:

• GeoFlow is now called Power Map, it is a mapping tool built into Excel 2013 that adds some great capabilities that were not previously available
• Data Explorer is now called Power Query, it is a tool for discovering, accessing and combining data from multiple different sources (online, private or enterprise)

These new offerings go along with PowerPivot and Power View that are already built into Excel 2013. All of these tools together are now going to be called Power BI and they will all only be available in Excel for Office 365! With these being all offered together in Office 365 they are also going to make all of them HMTL5 compatible, meaning that any mobile device or browser will be able to use all of the functions! Yes, that does include the iPad and Android tablets! As long as the browser can properly process HTML5 it should work. Another interesting offering as part of Power BI is Q&A, which is a new natural language querying language that you will be able to use to create quick graphs and charts based on a question.

All of this is a big deal for those of us that work in the Business Intelligence business because it is a huge push into cloud and end-user/self-service BI by Microsoft. Previously a lot of the offerings have been in the Enterprise BI space with Reporting Services, Analysis Services and even the initial versions of PowerPivot and Power View in SharePoint. Now Microsoft is making a bold move to make the easy to use BI tools available in the tool that everyone in business uses on a daily basis, Excel. Now, it's not going to be in the same desktop version of Excel that most use, at first it will only be in Excel on Office 365. Nothing that I have read indicates that this will cost extra, and based on how Microsoft typically launches these kind of enhancements I don't think that it will cost extra for existing Office 365 subscribers. The only pieces of this that you can try today on your desktop versions of Excel 2013 are Power Query and Power Map (and of course PowerPivot and Power View that are already included), see the links to download the latest versions of both. You can provide your email to be notified when the preview is publicly available at this link.

Looking forward to being able to try all of this out as I just purchased an Office 365 subscription myself. I know that a lot of Enterprise customers will be very upset that all of these tools are only available in Office 365, but I think that this is a very smart move and I can't believe that it won't eventually end up in the desktop versions of Office at a point in the future.

Here is a link to Chris Webb's blog post from today about these announcements that also has some links to other posts for you to get even more details. As soon as the preview is available I will run it through it's paces and post about it here.

Office Mobile for iPhone (with Office 365)

Microsoft just released Office Mobile for iPhone today! This is the long rumored application that Microsoft has been ready to release for quite awhile, but holding off until it could figure out how the purchasing would work with the Apple App Store. I'm not sure if/how they worked all of that out, but I do know that the app is free in the App Store and it requires an Office 365 Home Premium or ProPlus subscription. I already have a Home Premium subscription, so I was able to just click the button to sign in to my existing account and it worked. There is a button for those that don't have an Office 365 subscription, not sure where that goes, but I assume it will take you to the appropriate Microsoft page to buy the subscription (which is where the issues with the Apple App Store come in).

This app does not currently connect with Enterprise versions of Office 365, as I tried to log into my accounts provided by Microsoft for our User Group and my company and neither worked. The good news is that once you sign in with your Office 365 Home Premium or ProPlus subscription then you can add other sources for documents (called Places in the app) and from there you can connect to any Office 365 Enterprise account (using the Office 365 SharePoint option in the Add a Place screen) or even your Enterprise hosted SharePoint server (using the SharePoint option in the Add a Place screen).

The benefits to the Office 365 Home Premium subscription are huge the more computers that you plan to install the Office applications on to. You get 5 full licenses to the whole Microsoft Office suite for PC or Mac  and it will always be the latest version of Microsoft Office. Plus you get 20GB of extra space on your SkyDrive account, for me that bumped me up around 50GB total. You also get 60 minutes of Skype World minutes to use on a Skype account for calls around the world. And you get free access to all of these mobile applications that Microsoft is starting to roll out for all platforms. I think that it is an awesome deal at $99.99/year or $9.99/month.

For now it is only on the iPhone, but that is great for my use since I always have my iPhone with me and now if I need to do some quick edits or bring up one of the many Office documents I have on my SkyDrive I can view/edit them in the more familiar Office apps, instead of risking editing them on another app that might mess up the document. Hopefully in the near future this will also come out for the iPad, but at least for now I have it on the mobile device that I use the most.

For more information, here is the link to the Microsoft Office blog post about the iPhone app and the Microsoft Office 365 home page.

While this may not seem like it is a Microsoft BI related post, I'm hopeful that this will also lead to the Excel version on the iPhone doing all of the same cool BI stuff that we can do on the desktop in the near future! I'll let you know as I use the apps more if I find any of that or when those new features are added.