http://www.bonavistasystems.com/Download2/Airline%20Dashboard2.png

BonaVista (MicroCharts) has released some interesting Excel-based dashboards using their sparkline formatting add-ins.  You could take a page from Stephen Few's Information Dashboard Design book and Xerox it and it would be a dead-on duplicate of many of these examples.

A couple of things jump out at you...

• Color is not that important in an effective dashboard
• Numeric and Graphical Representation are balanced
• Data Marks are maximized (an Ed Tufte principle)
• Use of embedded bars on the right to pull tabular data out and make it *pop* - you are increasingly seeing this trend in financial dashes (www.cnbc uses this a lot)

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/04/microsoft_is_de.php

Nick Carr, a frequent Microsoft critic, had glowing words for the quarter and future outlook.

"To put Microsoft's results in context, it's useful to compare them to those of the juggernaut that is Apple Inc. Apple's sales in the last quarter soared 21% over year-earlier levels, rising from $4.4 billion to $5.3 billion. It was, as headline writers put it, a "blowout" quarter. But Apple's growth pales in comparison to Microsoft's. Microsoft, a much larger company than Apple, increased its sales by 32% in the quarter, from $10.9 to $14.4 billion."

http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/sdk/

Version 5.0 of the map control provides the following:

• A completely new, advanced set of features for Pushpins, Polylines and Polygons
• Support for Popup Info Boxes with a custom look and feel
• A way to group shapes using Shape Layers
• Complete control over Mouse and Keyboard Events
• The same Bird’s Eye Panning and mini map that you see on maps.live.com and A More Accurate Bird's Eye Set Center Method.
• A smaller download, thanks to a Compressed Map Control
• An optional Small Navigation Dashboards
• A reorganized, more straightforward method for Finding Locations and Businesses
• Developer control over Tile Overfetching
• More straightforward support for Tile Layers
• Virtual Earth API support for the Japanese market using Programmatic Market Selection.

http://www.phillydotnet.org/Default.aspx?tabid=589

The Philly.net users group is hosting a code camp at the Microsoft Malvern Office (where I work) on May 19th.  You can register here (http://www.phillydotnet.org/Default.aspx?tabid=589) - it will sell out fast so move quickly.

Session list:

Edwin Ames - Controlling Access to Your Application
John Baird - Unit Testing in .NET, Compact Framework Development
Jean Barmash - Aspect Oriented Programming, InfoPath & Forms Server, Workflow in SharePoint 2007
Russ Basiura - Building Internet Facing Websites using MOSS
Sam Batterman - SQL Data Mining
Dan Clark - ETL Dataflows in SSIS, Extend SSIS with Script
Don Demsak - Intro to LINQ: Reinventing Visual Basic
Sam Gentile - WCF/SOA, Windows Workflow
Kevin Goff - Intro to WCF, Data Driven Web Pages in ASP.NET, AJAX, and SQL
David Hoerster - Windows Communication Framework
Rob Keiser - Powershell Programming
Travis Laborde - Tools of the Trade, Developer Testing 101
David Laribee - NHibernate and the Domain Model, New Hotness in Enterprise Library 3.0
Mark Magliocco - RSS Basics
Chuck Miller - Composite UI Application Block, Validation
Mitch Ruebush - Extensible Framework Development with Plugins, XNA Game Development
Bill Wolff - SharePoint Content Types, XAML and Silverlight in Expression and Visual Studio

I hope to see you there!

http://nickbarclay.blogspot.com/   http://adriandownes.blogspot.com/

Nick is a great blogger and he informed me earlier this week that he had completed a book on Business Scorecard Manager 2005 that he co-authored with Adrian Downes.  Get in line at Amazon and support your fellow BI Bloggers!

http://www.npr.org/stations/

While I'm not a huge fan of NPR (it always reminds me of Saturday Night Live skits involving soft-spoken people talking earnestly about macrame techniques), but this is a pretty neat visualization.

http://www.speculativebubble.com/videos/real-estate-roller-coaster.php

The graph below was built and animated as a roller coaster.
When you watch it here are two tips:

• 1. The blue bar on the bottom will show you dates - they could have handled this better (IMHO)
• 2. When you watch it - put your hands in the air and scream like a little girl - just for effect.

http://www.speculativebubble.com/videos/real-estate-roller-coaster.php

http://www.fractaledge.com/products-fma.htm

...allows any Excel pivot table to be instantly shown as a Fractal Map. 

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2007/04/15/introducing-microsoft-silverlight.aspx

The formerly known WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere) runs on Windows, Linux, Apache and even Apple machines.

You can find out more here: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/default_01.aspx

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2007-04-12-graham-microsoft_N.htm

Just for fun I took the Vostok Research Station Ice Core Data that was prominently shown in the "Inconvenient Truth" and decided to use the SQL 2005 Time Series Data Mining Model on it.

For the layperson, this algorithm attempts to predict future steps based on historical behaviors.

Here's the data set:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/trends/temp/vostok/vostok.1999.temp.dat

Here is some reference in case you want to try it yourself:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v329/n6138/abs/329408a0.html

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2D779CD5-EEB2-43E9-BDFA-641ED89EDB6C&displaylang=en

Just got back from talking to a customer and the ability to design cubes in SQL Server Analysis Services to leverage Excel 2007 as a BI client was a prominent topic.

Specifically, best way to build a cube and get:

• Drill Down
• Measure Groups
• Display Folders
• Named Sets
• Perspectives
• KPIs
• Actions
• and Member Properties  (an old AS 2000 concept) was a key topic.

Ooops - both Nick Barclay and Chris Webb posted on this topic this morning - sorry guys.

http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!1pi7ETChsJ1un_2s41jm9Iyg!/

Very useful, Chris - Thanks!