Microsoft launches BI Labs

Microsoft has many labs under its belt. Office Labs, Microsoft Fused Labs, DevLabs, etc.  These labs are meant for showcasing the technologies  which can be later converted into full-fledged commercial products.

Microsoft has launched a new entrant into their Labs known as BI LABS or Business Intelligence Labs.

As the name suggest, here the technologies will be more focused on getting business value. The business value can be in terms of the critical analysis of the data or matching the various sets of data etc. There will be some useful applications also, rather than a full-fledged technology which can be used by the companies around the world. These tools are available are on the website to download and try but they are not part of featured BI products commercially available.

BI Labs is a collection of experimental business intelligence projects and useful applications made available from internal sources across Microsoft. These projects are prototypes and concepts, and there are no current plans to include them in Microsoft products.

The BI Labs is the conglomeration of various teams of Microsoft. Some of the cool applications available right now are :

• PivotViewer  Extension for Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services: This tool allows you to model the SQL Server data by visualizing the large collections in a way that show the relationships that connect them. This is been developed by using PivotViewer of Microsoft Silverlight.
• Microsoft SQL Server Data Mining for the cloud: It is a collection of cloud-based data-mining services based on the data-mining platform available as part of SQL Server Analysis Services. We might see a separate new space called Data Mining-as-a-Service with this.
• Fuzzy Look-up add-in in Microsoft Excel 2010: This is by far the most impressive BI Lab offering. It is used to perform the Fuzzy matching of textual data in Microsoft Excel 2010. It can be used to identify fuzzy duplicate rows within a single table or to fuzzy join similar rows between two different tables. The matching is robust to a wide variety of errors including spelling mistakes, abbreviations, synonyms, and added or missing data.

There are some other technologies also like “MDX and DAX formatter”  and “Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services Log viewer” which are called as grassroot projects which helps you in testing or diagnosing.

Check them all by visiting Microsoft BI Labs.