Deliver Actionable Insight with Data Mining

itprotipsadmin — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 06:01:00 GMT

By Michael K. Campbell

As I mentioned in a previous tip, one of the things I’ve finally decided to look into a lot more this year is Business Intelligence and Business Performance Management. Mostly just to get a feel for what kinds of benefits these ‘disciplines’ provide, but also to help round out my SQL skills. In Deliver Actionable Insight Throughout Your Organization with Data Mining (Part 3 of 3), I gained some great insights into how to add predictive analysis into existing solutions in order to help improve business intelligence.

This webcast starts off with an overview of the differences between typical ‘retrospective’ KPIs, and then contrasts them with predictive KPIs to help show the difference between a pro-active, rather than re-active, approach to business intelligence.

An example of the difference would be a report telling a business they missed a sales goal (retrospective), versus a dashboard or report that tells a business that they’re GOING to miss a sales goal.

TIP: This webcast tells you how to use status expressions to normalize the variances between actual and anticipated KPIs to make them easier to digest by end-users and data consumers.

Then, after mentioning three likely areas to consume predictive KPIs, this webcast drops into a discussion of how to take advantage of existing functionality within SSIS in order to predict, or forecast, an outcome based on existing trends within the data.

Of course, after explaining that kind of functionality, the logical next step for this webcast was to turn to a demonstration. By showing how to create value expressions based on the percentage of customers pulled from various clusters, the first demo in this webcast showed how to contrast actual values against a goal – and then evaluate the difference in the form of indicators that can be provided as visual cues about how well a given measure is performing against a stated goal or prediction.

What was cool though, was then showing how an end-user would be able to see this within a typical scorecard (in this case, expressed in SharePoint) – as this really helped make everything that much more clear.

From this point the presenter began heavily focusing on the notion of prediction tables – something that was new to me. But the way this information was presented made a lot of sense – as it showcased how the use of prediction tables provided an easy way to add predictive, or pro-active, KPI functionality to existing business intelligence solutions. Best of all, the presenter really helped put everything into perspective by showing a typical workflow that showcased how prediction tables can be used in real-world situations.

Then, to make everything even more clear, the webcast delved into another demonstration showing how to actually execute on the data flow for this solution. The demonstration shows a sample SSIS package that utilized a Data Mining Query transform along with a conditional split to create a new prediction table that could be added to an existing Data Source View. This is then bound into an existing model as an easy-to-use resource that can be harnessed to provide predictive capabilities or KPIs in reports and dashboards.

Amazingly though, this webcast still had more to give, and provided a third demo that showcased ways to use Excel, embedded in SharePoint Reports, to provide similar predictive functionality for different users.

TIP: This webcast provides links to detailed information on how to use Excel and SharePoint to provide predictive reports. It also provides links to Data Mining Add-Ins that can be used to give Excel specialized Data Mining and predictive capabilities.

I’m not quite sure why Microsoft used a title as awkward and bulky as Deliver Actionable Insight Throughout Your Organization with Data Mining (Part 3 of 3) for this webcast, but if you’re interested in learning about ways to bridge the gap between BI and BPM, then you should definitely check this webcast out for some great options and ideas.

Customizing Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007

itprotipsadmin — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 06:01:00 GMT

By Richard Lane

Thanks to the big search engines, it is sometimes easier to find stuff on the Internet than on your own local network, which just seems silly. This is a problem that Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 was born to solve. In this introductory webcast on Customizing Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007, TechNet expert Matt Hester shows how to create customized, targeted search pages that search across databases as well as documents. The webcast is only a little over 20 minutes long and is well worth watching if you manage SharePoint Server 2007 or simply want to know more about how search works within Microsoft’s collaboration server.

It is easy to get confused about which SharePoint is which. This webcast is about Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, sometimes known as MOSS, rather than the free SharePoint Services add-on for Windows Server (WSS). Matt Hester explains the relationship between the two, and how they are more consistent with one another in the latest release.

Hester’s overview of what’s new in SharePoint Server 2007 reminded me of the scope of the product, from programming platform to search portal.

When I saw “Decoupling of content sources from scope” on the slide, I was hoping Hester would fully explain what that meant as it’s real SharePoint jargon. Luckily I was not disappointed, though I had to be patient.

Any organization has documents that are private to certain groups. Here’s where we learn how SharePoint handles that, and how it does it much better than the previous version.

TIP: SharePoint Server 2007 is less tightly coupled to Active Directory than before, making it easier to support anonymous or external users.

In the next and longest part of the webcast, Hester fires up his Virtual PC and walks through customizing search. It all starts with Search Settings in the Administration site, where we learn more about those mysterious content sources.

Not having looked at this before, I was impressed by the variety of different sources that SharePoint 2007 can search, including Exchange public folders and databases.

TIP: Hester explains how to force a newly-added scope to update immediately so you can check it out more quickly

Next we walk through adding scope rules. Hester does a great job of explaining what this is all about.

Right within the administration site, Hester shows how to create a new page for custom search. It’s only a few clicks, but the results look totally professional.

If you’ve used SharePoint, you’ll know how the user interface is based on tabs. Hester shows how to make a new tab, complete with a tooltip explaining what the tab does.

It works! Hester shows us an example search with its results, and then highlights perhaps the coolest feature of the entire presentation – a “best bet” search result which you can see starred on the right of the above screenshot. Creating best bet results is remarkably easy and delivers fantastic value for users.

What impressed me most in this webcast was SharePoint Server’s ease of use. Provided you are happy with the built-in templates, you can get good-looking and effective custom search pages using only the SharePoint administration site – no coding required.

TechNet Webcast Express: Customizing Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007.

IT Pro Tips : SharePoint

Deliver Actionable Insight with Data Mining

Customizing Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007