The difficulty of processing unstructured data is most often brought up in the context of the business analysts charged with extracting the insights inside, but it’s an equally big challenge for the developers who produce the software supporting that work. Last week saw Microsoft Corp. come to the rescue with a new service that makes usage logs from an organization’s Office 365 deployment available in one place for applications to tap.

Microsoft Graph thus avoids the need to create a separate integration for each of the offerings in the cloud-based productivity suite, which can free up a tremendous amount of time both during the initial development phase and from ongoing maintenance thereafter. The potential use cases are numerous. Organizations could plug the service into their e-discovery software to find misplaced files in OneDrive, or correlate activity data from Word and Outlook to check if employees are sharing sensitive documents with unauthorized parties.

Sisense Inc. offers to extend that visibility to their relational systems with the ODBC connector added to its business intelligence platform shortly after Microsoft Graph was launched. The integration enables customers to pull records from any software that supports structured data access, including Excel, and correlate the output with their unstructured information to gain an understanding of the big picture. The results can then be visualized using the built-in reporting functionality.

The ODBC driver is one of several new features included in Sisense 6.0, which debuted against the backdrop of another up-and-coming analytics vendor debuting a new iteration its namesake platform.  BrightEdge Content Optimizer 4.0 introduces what is described as a personalization engine that can help marketers determine everything from the specific combination of topics that a particular segment of their audience finds the most interesting to the optimal headline length for promoted articles.

Image via Geralt