Ah, day 2 has arrived so I got up at 6 to get ready and watch the email trickle down (Emerald Casino appears to only have GPRS for Vodacom) which didn’t finish in the end. Unfortunately this post will not be as informative as the previous two, because what I was doing was taking notes on the machine I was working on and about an hour before the end of the day there was a power failure and I was not able to retrieve my notes :( So not only did we leave early, it was meant to be a short day to begin with… nice for a Friday to avoid traffic and get home early.
What stood out for me for that day was working with PerformancePoint which is a business user tool to build dashboards, KPI’s and scorecards. It was impressive at how easy it was to work with it, especially considering that in the background it’s creating cubes, writing MDX etc… This is the way this is meant to be. However it is a BUSINESS USER tool, so much so that Kevin (the presenter from IS Partners) was telling how they hired four CA’s in the last month and trained them to use PerformancePoint rather than training “BI people” to understand business. From speaking to some of the Microsoft people who have used it, the installation of PerformancePoint though is exceptionally tough and I was disappointed that it was not even touched on :(
Anyway without notes it’s hard to write long posts without possibly making huge mistakes, so I will leave it there for what was covered.
As an event it delivered on the initial point of being a level 200 course and helping understand the concepts and helping business users. The problems with labs and manual are understandable (these things happen) but considering you are paying for this and this is a MICROSOFT event it definitely should’ve been more professional than it felt. I would recommend this course to analysts and business users but not to development or serious BI users.