Hey All! I've been REALLY heads down lately, putting in big hours at a company, and I haven't had much free time to blog over the past couple weeks. Sorry for that! However, I've been keeping busy with some really cool stuff!

I'm on a Business Intelligence (BI) project right now, and I'm writing some web parts that present data via Dundas OLAP Services from some SQL Analysis Services cubes. Tangent – BI work rocks! It's been my most fun project to work on, to date!

Here are some screen shots of my web parts:

Dundas is a great tool to leverage. They have inherit SharePoint web parts, right out of box. Unfortunately, my business requirements were too complicated to leverage these, but they also publish the base OLAP services charting that can be leveraged programmatically via any ASP.NET application. In my case, I simply dropped the Dundas chart on a CONTROL TEMPLATE, and loaded that template via my web part. So easy! Notice the red box, you can load many reports into one chart, and the end users can toggle between them. Also, you through that toolbar, the end user can toggle chart colors as well as chart type (bar, line, area, etc.). Very slick indeed.

Here's a sample of some averages plotted with a column chart:

What's REALLY SWEET is that you can drill into the data. For example, if you click on a date or a column, you can see how that metric is composed. For me, when the user clicks the column, they get an hourly breakdown for that day's data (it's in military time – gotta fix that J):

So, to summarize, Microsoft is getting it right with the track they're taking on business intelligence – and I totally see why they bought out Dundas, it's an impressive tool!

Good luck!

Phil