December 19, 2013 News Thursday: Microsoft Updates Power BI for Office 365 and More Cloud and Enterprise News...

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by C&E BloggerMicrosoft Updates Power BI for Office 365

This month Microsoft updated the previews of Power BI for Office 365 and Power Query for Excel. These updates provide customers with more ways to explore, analyze and find insights on their data.

Specific updates include:

  • Enhancements to Power BI for Office 365: Power BI for Office 365 arms information workers with data analysis and visualization capabilities, enabling them to identify deeper business insights either on premises or within a trusted cloud environment. Q&A, a popular Power BI feature, allows customers to ask questions of their data using natural language and get instantaneous results in the form of interactive charts and graphs. Q&A now supports the ability for customers to explore their own datasets.
  • Updates to Power Query: Microsoft enhanced the user experience in Power Query by adding automatic detection between tables and new functionality in the Query Editor. Additionally, Power Query now supports data sources from Dynamics CRM Online, Exchange, JSON light, and Sybase IQ. These additional data sources give customers more options to discover, access, and combine data for analysis in Excel.

For more information on these updates, check out this post on the Power BI blog. In addition, customers can sign up for the Power BI for Office 365 preview here. To stay up to date on the latest news about Power BI for Office 365, follow Microsoft BI on Facebook and Twitter.

Parallels Joins Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program to Help Microsoft Customers Using Parallels Hypervisor

Hosting and cloud services provider Parallels has been validated under the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). This validation enables customers running Windows Server with Parallels Hypervisor to receive technical support for Windows Server in virtualized environments. This SVVP validation demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to support customers who run Microsoft operating systems and applications on third-party hypervisors.

Read the press release for more information.