I enjoyed the meetup but was a disappointed that the Microsfot presentation did not really focus on differentiation of their product(s) to competitors in the space.
Clearly have a broad offering but presentations were high-level and did not give practitioners a good idea of product positioning within the suite or specific use cases suited to the respective components. In my personal opinion, too much focus on Excel and not enough substance of fundamentals of their offerings. More depth please.

Very much appreciate the commitment from Microsoft to the BI Meetup. Unfortunately the presentation was too narrowly focused on the visualization components and didn't show the best of breed elements such as Analysis Services at all. As other respondents have noticed, the current product stack seems to be a stepping stone to a better integrated solution - from both the end-user and IT perspectives - and it's hard to understand which of the current technologies to build an application around.

It was really good to see, so many people showed interested in BI space. Not sure, if they presentation lived upto the expectation. I hope, most of us being technical people, it would be useful if future events are more hands on rather than power point presentation.

My first meetup with this group and didn't get a chance to get a good grasp of what the format is of this group as this was more of a vendor presentation. I've seen the Microsoft BI presentation before except this time they seem to resolved the performance issues. To the people who is seeing it the first time, the Microsoft presenter did a poor job of explaining which product he was showing and how the data was flowing through.

The presentation might as well have been called "leveraging Excel and SSAS as tools for doing some analytics". In other words, "the tip of the tip of an iceberg" in any kind of business intelligence initiative. It looked to me that 95% of an effort to get to nice, shiny data cubes was conveniently glossed over. I was expecting something much broader, deeper and meatier. Microsoft must have some thoughts about how to turn silos of dirty corporate data into BI, but it didn't show. Maybe next time?

It was a well organized meeting; I particularly liked Yuriy's role as the moderator. On MSFT's part, I had mixed feelings the reason probably is that I have been working with their "BI stack" for a while now; hence I did not need an introduction. In addition, one of the MSFT presenters continued to show how to drag and drop and ignored to mention the need for programming skills for these new technologies such as the need for MDX skills to develop advanced/sophisticated reports in PPS and SSAS.

Event was well organized (as all have been perviously)... I would like to learn more about how Msft is revolutionizing this space moving forward.. I would like to see a follow-up event with this vendor, and look forward to the upcoming events.. nice job.