Imagine a page on your site with information coming from any line of business application displayed in a graphical dashboard with live, up-to-date data and the ability to drill into the details and filter any way you like. Sound exciting? Then you are going to love the new products coming out with the 2010 wave.

Microsoft’s PowerPivot (previously known as Gemini code name) has officially hit the world in two versions, one for SQL Server and the other for SharePoint. PowerPivot allows you to drill-in, filter, and sort on any category of data in your charts. Imagine the power of Excel’s Pivot Table now inside of SharePoint.

The example provided into today’s breakout session was a chart coming from PerformancePoint, a Visio diagram showing a map of the U.S. color-coded based on the data, and an Excel chart, all bound to live data.

In addition to the stunning visual charts, also available is a web part displaying the profile of the owner of the page with their image and contact info along with a Notes Board allowing for viewers to add their own comments.

All the data on this dashboard is live and the page refresh is seamless. SharePoint hardly misses a step.

Another cool functionality that was demonstrated is a timeline slider that allows you to view the data in the visual chart as it progresses through time by sliding it across with your mouse.

I can’t wait to start implementing this!

More to come this afternoon…

Sandra Tersteeg