I had the privilege of working with Tessa Hurr (PM on the Power BI team) on a presentation for the 2020 Microsoft Business Applications Summit (MBAS) about five features in Power BI that increase report accessibility. This 23-minute presentation is almost entirely demos, and only a few slides. While we talk about some features such as alt text and tab order that are primarily used for accessibility purposes, we also talk about how chart titles, header tooltips, and report themes can be used to make your report more accessible.

The conference was entirely online this year, and you can catch the sessions on demand now. I hope you’ll take some time to watch my session as well as the other great content that came from the conference. You can watch my session on the MBAS website.

The team at Denny Cherry & Associates Consulting is thrilled to announce that we will have 3 presenters each presenting a full day presentation at the PASS Summit.

Denny’s Session

Denny Cherry will be presenting an all-day session called “Microsoft Azure Platform Infrastructure”.

In this one-day session, we’ll review the various infrastructure components that make up the Microsoft Azure platform. When it comes to moving SQL Server systems into the Azure platform, having a solid understanding of the Azure infrastructure will make migrations successful and support solutions easier. Designing your Azure infrastructure properly from the beginning is extremely important. An improperly designed and configured infrastructure will result in performance problems, manageability problems, and can be difficult to resolve without downtime. As Azure scales out around the world, many more companies will begin moving services from data centers into the Azure platform, and a solid foundation is the key to successful migrations.

Meagan’s Session

Meagan Longoria will be presenting an all-day session called “Building Power BI Reports that Communicate Insights and Engage People“.

Creating a Power BI report involves data analysis, cognitive science, graphic design, communication, and user experience design. To be successful, we need to approach it holistically, rather than see it as “just a data thing”.

This session will use lecture, demos, and hands-on activities to learn about Power BI features, techniques for building reports, visual design concepts, and the basics of human perception and learning. You’ll learn how to define your message, choose an appropriate visual, and format the visual to optimize information intake. We’ll also discuss how to arrange our visuals coherently in a report and how to implement storytelling in Power BI.

You’ll leave the session with an understanding of defining success in data visualization, how humans consume visual information and interact with reports, and how to create a report to communicate and stimulate viewer engagement. Attendees will receive a list of resources to use in future report design endeavors.

John’s Session

John Morehouse will be presenting an all-day session called “Avoiding the Storms When Migrating to Azure“.

Have you recently decided to move to Microsoft Azure, but don’t know where to start? Do you have concerns about how to get your data there? Thankfully, migrating to Azure isn’t as daunting as you might think.

In this full-day, hands-on session, you will learn about the foundations of the Microsoft Azure SQL Platform ecosystem. We will examine the differences between Azure SQL Database, Managed Instances, and SQL Server in an Azure VM, as well as how to migrate to each of these options. We will ensure that you understand the basics around networking in Azure and how the network connects back to your on-premises environment. After performing some live migrations, we will explore topics such as ensuring data safety, including high availability, disaster recovery, security controls, and encryption.

By the end of this session, you will obtain newfound confidence to help you get data up into the cloud in a safe, secure, cost effective, and successful manner!

A 2 Day Learning Path

If you are new to the cloud and you want to have a full two days that will get you from 0 to ready to deploy in Azure, then I’d highly recommend Denny’s session on Monday, followed by John’s session on Tuesday. While Denny’s session will cover the infrastructure and all the various components that you can use in Azure; John’s will bring the Azure knowledge back to the flavors of SQL Server that Azure focuses on. With those being:

• Azure SQL Database
• Azure SQL Managed Instance
• Azure SQL within a Virtual Machine

While Denny will be focusing on what can be set up, John will be focusing on how to set up specific features for best performance as well as how to migrate to those features. For those that don’t want to take both sessions, there will be some overlap between the two so that everyone is up to speed on the SQL Server nuts and bolts before going into the how and the migration pieces.

We’re extremely proud of our three speakers, and all three of these sessions are going to be fantastic. We hope to see you at these sessions, and the rest of the PASS Summit. So get registered before these great precon sessions sell out.

Denny