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In two weeks, Webworld Technologies will be attending the SharePoint 2009 conference in Las Vegas.  Among many topics that we’re looking forward to finding out about, one of them is the integration between SharePoint 2010 and Project Gemini – a technology which puts an immense amount of OLTP power right into Excel 2010, such that one can work with very large data sets, hacking & slicing, right from a mainstream laptop PC.   

The following video by Microsoft gives a sneak peek at this, showing the presenter looking at multiple dimensions of a 20-million-row dataset right from within Excel. 

Thomas Ivarsson from Microsoft BI sums up Gemini as follows:

Gemini is not only about analyzing large amount of data but also about getting relational storage capacities naitivly in Excel 2010. It is that functionality that let you build quick structures for analyzing data that can be  a complement to the classical data warehouse approach.

Now, from an IT perspective, we’re of course quite interested in how this will end up integrating into SharePoint 2010’s Excel services.  But more interesting to me is how this will end up playing out in some of the other collaborative dynamics, with respect to what one can then do with Excel and SharePoint.

An example:  take the Excel plugins that web analytics tools such as Omniture or Webtrends ship with presently – or the somewhat limited XML output that Google Analytics can provide.  Right now, for the most part, folks only deal with abstracted summaries of their web traffic data, top-25 lists of page views, etc. 

However, Project Gemini could change all this, with respect to the roles that such analytics packages could provide – especially with ones ability to then collaborate and communicate about the data gleaned from such reports, using SharePoint 2010.   One could then take a relatively busy site, and get a dump of all of your web traffic data for the week, and use Gemini to cut/slice the data to get great insights into your data. 

But better yet, from Webtrends’ or Omniture’s view, this is a great move for them – as that means their own CPU power doesn’t need to be constantly pounded for people’s knarly OLTP queries.  They can instead make use of that new Core i7 laptop they just shelled out for. 

And putting that within the framework of SharePoint 2010 means even more communication and action on that data.

I’m very interested to see what the presenters have to say on this at the SharePoint 2009 Conference, so that we can start making these solutions useful to our government and commercial clients.

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