Power BI vs Datazen

By Satalyst Brilliance on 20 Jul 2015

As you may have heard, Microsoft acquired Datazen in April 2015 to boost their BI dashboarding and mobility offering. This announcement has left a lot of people confused - where does Datazen fit in the Microsoft BI roadmap? Does Datazen compete with Power BI? Complement Power BI?

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Azure AD Join on Windows 10 devices

By Todd on 04 Jun 2015

General availability for Windows 10 is due on July 29, 2015. Satalyst Software Architect, Damien Herbert, attended the Microsoft 2015 Ignite conference in Chicago last month and heard firsthand about the many new features and capabilities Enterprise has to look forward to with Windows 10. One of the many that excites us is Azure Active Directory Join. Azure AD Join is the functionality that registers a device with Windows 10 in Azure AD to enable centralised management. It means users can be connected to the cloud through Azure AD, enabling simplified Windows configuration and deployments. It will allow seamless single sign-on access from a Windows device to apps and resources in the cloud, such as Office 365 and plethora of business applications that rely on Azure AD for authentication. Azure AD Join will work on devices that don’t have the traditional domain join capabilities. With Azure AD Join, Windows authenticates directly to Azure AD, so no Domain Controller is required. Windows 10 devices that are joined to Azure AD will also provide single sign-on access to on-premises resources when connected to the corporate network and from anywhere with the Azure AD Application Proxy. Azure AD Join will bring significant flexibility and…

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Power Query: Creating a parameterized function in M

By Satalyst Brilliance on 19 May 2015

This will be part two in my on-going series about Power BI, Power Query, and the general joys of data. In my last post I outlined how to iterate over a list in Power Query. But what if I want to iterate over a list and need to parameterize it with today’s date? What if I want to issue multiple web requests based on a list? This is exactly the scenario I had when trying to fetch crime data from the WA Police web site. First, I have to thank my colleague and web wizard John Chillemi who authored the azure website that I’m using. The WA Police site has all the data, but not in a nice HTML table, which is what Power Query needs. So, thanks to John, I can execute a single web request and get a webpage that looks like this:   The web request takes five parameters – Suburb, Start Month, Start Year, End Month, and End Year, as seen below: I’d like to execute that web request for every suburb in Western Australia (there are over 1300 by my count) so obviously this is a case for automation, which means I need an M parameterized…

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