Infosys | Microsoft

Here is a statement from the article - "it's an initiative that's telling us that we as developers don't understand how to present information and its attendant tools". To me this basic premise itself is flawed. Developers really don't know how to present information in the best manner and that's why designers exist. For many years we have tried to push designers to the back, but that was mostly because what they designed could not be easily converted to working programs due to inherent technological limitations. If developers had their way, things would all be rectangular grid, rectangular buttons, rectangular drop downs, misaligned controls, no aesthetic sense of colors or font.

Metro is a big jump and there is no denying it. And maybe it is that, that is causing some distress. But then back in mainframe era, we worked with green screen or black and white displays on Dos prompt and were happy about it. Then came in Windows and many people questioned, why someone had to introduce this funny looking device called mouse, but do we think it funny today? In fact as per the author of the blog, he cannot think of not working with mouse and keyboard. Another few years and the world would have moved to natural user interface (NUI) and we will wonder why did we ever had to use keyboard and mouse when we could interact with touch, gesture and speech kind of interfaces.

His example on IE also doesn't seem totally relevant. I would rather compare it with say the regular desktop where we see all the applications that are currently open (why worry only about IE Tabs?). I can easily ALT+TAB to another window or click on its title bar or its icon in taskbar or any such action and the applications are always running. However with smart phones and tablets, this programming paradigm got broken anyway. Now you typically have only one foreground application which occupies the entire screen, and the ones in the background get suspended. So if there is only one application visible at a time, it not having any chrome, to me, makes perfect sense. Why waste that much real estate on things that are no longer relevant? As far IE tabs go, I think it is one of those features that developers also had trouble initially as it caused issues with shared sessions across tabs.

Just like software applications have tons of features but a typical user only uses few of them, most applications tend to present far more data than that is required by and user to perform his or her task. I think Metro forces us to rethink that tendency to flood the user interface with information and believe that we have high information density. I think what we typically have is high data density and low information density. We do talk about navigation also and with high data density we can reduce that, but except for an air pilot, or a doctor or maybe a BPO call agent, others usual users are not so hard pressed of time that a few clicks will cause any trouble.

There is only so much information that our eyes can view and brain can digest in a given moment and I don't see a reason why that information cannot be beautifully and more cleanly and clearly laid out rather than try to clutter every inch of the screen and scare the user to think that he/she may have missed something important. Is Metro the answer to all current user interface and user experience issues? I don't know, but it certainly isn't something that we should write off as well. It is a different way to present information and forces us to come out of our comfort zone and work differently.

What are your thoughts on this?

Posted by Atul Gupta at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

PowerPivot is the tool which was introduced in SQL Server 2008 R2 as an add-in to Excel to provide self-service BI options to the end user. Users can create their own models by importing data from various data stores, implement business rules/calculations and create scorecards and dashboards using Pivot Tables and Pivot charts. Since it was provided in Excel, there was not much learning curve involved as it is already a tool of choice for doing analysis and number crunching.

Also for sharing such workbooks over Sharepoint, a separate component known as "PowerPivot for Sharepoint" has been provided in SQL Server which when installed provides services that take care of accessing and refreshing the models inside the workbook. The objective of PowerPivot is to give control to the business user to dig into the data and quickly come up with conceptual models without IT intervention. The data here can be in terms of millions of records which is more than the maximum limit than one can work in Excel. And still the size of the workbook remains relatively small due to high compression provided by the xVelocity engine in PowerPivot.

PowerView is an ad hoc reporting tool which will work only on the PowerPivot models published in Sharepoint. It is purely a visualization tool, which means, there is no scope for adding any extra calculations on top of whatever data is presented by the model. Any such calculation should be implemented in the model itself (calculated columns in PowerPivot). The objective of PowerView is to quickly drag and drop some fields and can create visually appealing reports. Apart from creating visualizations, there are lots of other features which provide good analysis techniques on the charts.

Power View is provided along with the SSRS add-in for Sharepoint that comes along with SQL Server 2012. Once it is installed, the user will be presented with a "Create Power View Report" option on the top right corner of the published Excel workbook containing the PowerPivot model as shown below.

The Power View is a web based reporting tool, there is no need for any extra installation on the client system apart from a browser with Silverlight support. All the options for creating a Power View report will be available inside the browser. The screenshot below shows an existing Power View report in editable mode.

The fields or columns in the model will be available on the right side. User just needs to drag and drop the fields onto the report canvas on the left and select the appropriate visualization as provided in the Chart Tools ribbon. Some of the prominent features of Power View are mentioned below

1. Web based ad hoc reporting tool to create reports on top of PowerPivot models. This make sense since all the business logic has already been implemented, nothing more to be done there apart from creating presentation-ready reports. Also availability over the browser helps the user to be still in context of the scenario for which he/she had accessed the Sharepoint site and was trying to create the report.
2. Simple drag and drop of fields to create reports and filters for powerful analytics. Also Power View makes use of the relations created between the tables in the model during the analysis. For example, if we click on the bar 2008Q1 on the first chart, the remaining charts will be filtered out to show data only for the first quarter of the year 2008. This is known as metadata interactivity.
3. A Power View report can contain multiple pages. Each page is referred to a view. Maintaining multiple views inside a single report is known as storyboarding. This would provide some useful insights into the existing data by analyzing it from multiple perspectives.
4. Analysis can be performed on a single chart by expanding it to full view. This is the pop out feature and the fields in the chart will be available as parameters in the filter pane. This could be useful since certain users would only be interested in a specific range lets say a particular category of products which their department contributes for. Filtering options are available per chart level or per view level.
5. Play axis feature is provided which could be considered as a fourth dimension when working with bubble or scatter charts. This option is usually set on the field which stores Time values (Year, Quarter or Month) so that trending analysis can be done over a period of time. The Play axis will provide an animation to display the trend for a particular object say a product or a trader etc.
6. PowerView reports can be exported to PowerPoint so that the charts can be included as part of your weekly or monthly presentations. The good part is you can display the analysis like changing filters, expand charts, metadata interactivity, play axis from within the slideshow. This could be very useful to answer any queries on the fly and helps to prove your point. Only point to note here is all the features require Silverlight so to maintain the same level of interactivity, Silverlight needs to be available on the client system along with PowerPoint. Otherwise, the charts will appear as static images.
   

To conclude, PowerView looks like a good start to create presentation-ready reports quickly and easily. However as of now, it works only with tabular models which is only available in SQL Server 2012. Users might want to start using PowerView on their existing relational tables or cubes rather than learning PowerPivot and DAX. Another point is PowerView only works with Sharepoint 2010 which could be an issue for users who doesn't have Sharepoint in their roadmap. Hopefully, these issues will be taken care in the subsequent releases.

Posted by Manoj Nair at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my previous blog I had talked about Metro Applications and Metro UI. Visual Studio 11 would qualify as an application with Metro like UI as we have already seen in the current beta release. It also no surprise that products from MS will imbibe the Metro style guide. We see similar trends with upcoming Office 15 (you can search online for images).

VS 11 however got some pretty strong comments from developer community and MS is making changes to its UI. The Metro look is here to stay, so it is still very much there, but the application has also been made a bit more colorful. Check out the details here.

Posted by Atul Gupta at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This article explains some real time issues that one may face while working with asp.net MVC and jquery. And accordingly the corresponding resolutions. These points if taken into consideration then may help a new developer leverage the benefits of asp.net MVC and jquery more.

In case any suggestions are there please let me know, I will more than happy to include them.

For the full article please refer to this.

Posted by Rahul Bandopadhyaya at 6:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)