My fourth post about FOWA is about a University Session that was organised during the first break, it was given by Microsoft‘s Martha Rotter and was on their new tool Pivot.

Martha is a developer and part of the Platform team at Microsoft Ireland and gave a pretty interesting live demo of the Pivot system.

Essentially Pivot is a free tool from Microsoft that can take huge datasets and display them in a user-friendly way.  I don’t want to talk too much about the tool because I haven’t played about with it myself but it is ran on Silverlight and therefore will work on anything from Vista up on Windows and OSX.  The website for finding out more is getPivot.com

After some preamble about the product Martha gave a live demo, which as I said was pretty interesting and whilst I can’t see a good reason to use the product myself I can see the benefit of creating the datasets required by Pivot to allow other users to access your information via this tool (so long as there was a solid user base behind it).

Martha delivered the demo well (even with the occasional technical hiccup) and it was refreshing seeing a Microsoft employee running Windows 7 via a virtual machine on a mac.

It will be interesting to see how Pivot develops in the coming months and what the general publics opinion of it is.