Sharepoint Business Intelligence

Emboss the Powerful Data Advancing SharePoint Business Intelligence into your Business!

Emboss the Powerful Data Advancing SharePoint Business Intelligence into your Business!

Various new structures in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 let you to assign, control and retrieve business information. The innovative features of SharePoint 2010 helps you connect to one another, to find assets for more information.

  SharePoint plugin toils with Report Design apparatus. The portal interface unites with SharePoint to guide users over a step-by-step statistics source connection and format process to describe design and management. Reports can be produced swiftly by merging the data into a pattern with a wide range of output options. Reports encompassing charts and tables will be at your fingertips that let you get the data you need at a glance with the increased workflow provided by SharePoint.

Consolidate the rewarding data from numerous sources comprising ProClarity and Excel provides significant reports for mentors and functional business extents to make superior decisions.

Requirements

To make use of the SharePoint Business Intelligence services, one has to work with the Microsoft SharePoint irrespective of the server.  And then, the membership directory should be in use with SQL server or an Active Directory.

 

Decomposition Tree

​Perform root cause evaluates using great analytics to examine staple data. View only the utmost pertinent data using the innovative Decomposition Tree. 

 

SharePoint Business Intelligence Blooms with SharePoint 2007 and 2010Servers:

When you announce reports from the documents in any of these structures, you provide tactical or active data for decision-makers. Officials and line managers rely on apt and perfect reports to make cognizant decisions!

 

The Report Center:

The new feature of SharePoint Business Intelligence of the server 2007 is the Report Center. The Report Center provides a central site for the storage of reports, lists plus connections to external documents that are shared by a group, either it is a small one team or as big as an entire business. This lets you to decide the way you want to utilize the benefits of the business intelligence skins within your specific office environment of the SharePoint Server 2007.  It also offers entree to page templates besides Web Parts to assist you fashion pages in addition to lists that enclose business information. In the Report Center, users can rifle for items by means of categories, observe a calendar of imminent reports, and subscribe to relevant reports.

By default, a Report is generated under the top-level portico. Yet with the apposite permissions, one can produce a Report Center site contained by a team, unit or an organization.

 

Excel Services

Excel 2010 is an absolute choice of the end-users assessment tool for viewing, manipulating, and execution of analysis on generating SharePoint Business Intelligence from, while producing reports regarding an organization's data. 

Excel Services is an application service of SharePoint Server 2010 which offers server-side calculation besides browser-based transcription of Excel workbooks. Excel Services can also be used for developing the following:

• Real-time, collaborative reporting to embrace parameterized what-if analysis
• Sharing of all or a part of an excel sheet for analysis by compound users

A platform for constructing SharePoint Business Intelligence from the Web, you can offer users "view only" privileges to maximize access to the workbook. Filters permit you to exhibit only the subsection of records or any information for which you are concerned in viewing.  You can also generate a glimpse of a workbook, instead of distributing it in an interactive approach.

 

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

 Key Performance Indicators are visual clues that converses the amount of advancement made toward a goal and is much helpful in working with SharePoint Business Intelligence solutions. KPIs are valuable for different business organizations to evaluate rapidly the growth made against computable goals. By utilizing SharePoint KPIs, anyone can certainly visualize solutions.

You can pileup KPI records in the Report Center or else in any available location in Office Server of SharePoint 2007, where the KPI’s can be recouped by anyone with consents to access them.

 

Makes IT More Proficient

​ SharePoint 2010 Perceptions provides an ample reporting plus analysis solution: a complete set of genera, an accustomed user experience, along with a solo console for running an organization. With integrated control of the structure, it saves time and work. Besides, you can be more proficient than before as you have amusing programming aptitudes and advance tools to deploy resolutions that meet precise business needs.

HP as well as Microsoft has provided the first ever accomplished self-service of SharePoint Business Intelligence significance, raised for SQL Server 2008 besides SharePoint Server 2010. Organize the elucidation in days, with immaculate IT resources!

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Along with PowerPivot Bring You Business Intelligence

PowerPivot for Excel 2010

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel 2010 allows Excel to provide the support for large data. There is an in-memory data store available as an option for SQL Server Analysis Services. By making the use of the PowerPivot for Excel, you can add the different data sources to have worksheets and data feeds as per the requirement of the program.

There are also client and server components available for the PowerPivot. The client is an increment to the workbooks in Excel, which contains PowerPivot data. This data can be easily published as per the requirements of a person’s program to the SharePoint Server 2010.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 PowerPivot for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is the server element and supports the PowerPivot compatibility with in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products.

 

You can make use of the PowerPivot for Excel when your aim is to add up the Excel functionality with the in-memory engine. This may depend on the requirement of your program as well. It allows the users to explore and perform calculations as required on a large data set and manipulate millions of data into mono workbook for the ad-hoc reports.

Excerpted from the Microsoft library

 

SQL Server Reporting Services in a SharePoint Server Business Intelligence Environment

SQL Server Reporting Services in SharePoint Server

SQL Server Reporting Services gives you  the services that help you generate and manage reports for a firm.

This is done on a Website or in SharePoint server as well. It has also some programming features, which enabls you to perform customization of the reports. The report tools generally work with an Office-type application. These are fully compiled and compatible with SQL Server components.

The compatibility is also to a great deal within the SharePoint Server environment. One can easily generate reports on SharePoint lists, and publishing the reports to SharePoint Server 2007 or to the SharePoint Server 2010 can be done quite easily. In addition, full management of your published reports in SharePoint libraries is also accomplished.

 

While using the SQL Server Reporting Services with SharePoint Server, there are usually two modes available to you and you can choose the one you think is good for you to work with.

The standard mode is called as the "Connected mode". It needs the SharePoint Server, the SQL Server Reporting Services add-in and the the SQL Server 2008 R2 Report Server to work efficiently.

The other mode is called to be "Local mode". It is a light setup. It is used for the Reporting Services to apply them with the SharePoint Server. It also needs the SharePoint Server and the SQL Server Reporting Services add-in.

 

 You can also make use of the SQL Server Reporting Services when you want to deliver the reports, which are published at the set intervals and are specially ordered on demand. It is also appropriate where the report requirements are well needed and customers are not much familiar with the dataset for the work.

(Excerpted from the Microsoft website.)

Matching a Tool in SharePoint Server 2010

Matching a tool

The following applications are generally applied in the scenarios described. (Excerpted from the Microsoft website.)

Tools	Scenarios
Excel 2010	It gives users a browser-based access to a server-calculated version. The Excel 2010 services are used to view and interact with the models, which are connected to the data sources. These are also then used for analysis and presentation of the saved data.
Excel Services	Sharing the matter with a number of persons working in a firm. Excel Services allows you to take content in Excel 2010 and make it to be used in an Internet browser. Excel Services is also includes a model, which is widely distributed. You can take a mortgage calculator as an example. In both the cases, Excel Services orders the author to publish the content, which was supposed to be published.
PerformancePoint Services	Creating dashboards, scorecards, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that deliver a summarized view of business a performance. PerformancePoint Services gives users integrated analytics for monitoring, analyzing, and reporting.
Visio Services	Building a visual representation of business structures that are bound to data. Processes and resources are its examples. An engineer generally uses the visuals to produce a data bound object, which represents a process.

Services in SharePoint Server for Business intelligence

Discover when you need to use a SharePoint BI tool in today's article.

Excel 2010

As you might be aware of the fact that Excel 2010 is an analysis tool and is  the choice for viewing, performing analysis on, and creating reports about the data of a firm. For more information on Excel 2010, refer to Microsoft Excel 2010. We'll instead focus on Excel Services in SharePoint.

Excel Services

Excel Services is a SharePoint Server 2010 program or a service, which providesthe server calculations and rendering of the workbooks in Excel. This image might make clearer to you the working associated with the Excel Services.

Excel Services are used for the following:

• Real-time reporting to include parameter analysis
• Distribution of a workbook for analysis by different users
• A platform for generating up the business applications

Visio Services

The Visio Graphics Service is a service available on the SharePoint Server 2010 platform. It allows its users to share and display the Visio diagrams. The service also switches ON the data Microsoft Visio 2010 diagrams to be updated at specific time intervals from different data sources. You can refer to the image shown below to make the working of the Visio Services clearer to you.

 

PerformancePoint Services

PerformancePoint Services are available to explore in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. It is a performance management service, which uses different tools to analyze the business. It gives you tools to generate a dashboard and key performance indicators. Scorecards can also be produced with the help of the PerformancePoint services. PerformancePoint Services helps the people in a firm to make make business decisions that match suitably with the objectives and different plans of the company.

You can also perform some additional things with PerformancePoint services listed as follows:

• You can gather data from different and a large number of data sources to keep a track and analysis of your data.
• The visualization Decomposition Tree allows you to make the visual analysis of the higher data from a provided datasheet.

Find more information on SharePoint business intelligence here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff394320.aspx

 

Selecting A Business Intelligence Tool in SharePoint Server 2010

Microsoft has a large number of business intelligence (BI) applications with BI features included in it. All of them are important to understand so that one can easily choose the best one in terms of working. The business intelligence tools are usually based on the problems and difficulties that one is trying to overcome.

The routine business activities are related to the information in three regions of business intelligence: personal, team, and organizational. There is sometimes overlapping between these areas. Let us take an example: an employee of a firm may use Microsoft Excel 2010 in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. This gives employee the authority to make business decisions. PerformancePoint Services uses Excel and Excel Services and hence it integrates its BI tools to generate and forward a dashboard, which should show the elements of team business intelligence. According to the default design, all Microsoft business intelligence products are interoperating. This allows people inside the firm to move across the continuum team and organization and all the products are gathered to work together.

The following image is showing tools from SQL Server and SharePoint Server to elaborate the corresponding categories in which the tool is actually used.

 

Note: The above image is showing the products from the Microsoft Office, SharePoint 2010 products, and SQL Server. 

SQL Server gives you data infrastructure for secure and trusted form of data. SharePoint Server is also used with SQL Server reporting and is capable of showing the business intelligence data in different new ways. To get more knowledge about how SQL Server is compatible with BI in SharePoint 2010, you can refer to the keywords SQL Server in a SharePoint environment and SQL Server (SharePoint Foundation 2010).

SharePoint Business Intelligence Part 2

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

A Key Performance Indicator is mainly responsible for checking the progress report of a goal. The key performance indicators are of very high value for managers and businesses. These help in analyzing the progress made against goals in quickly. A key performance indicator gives answer to the following questions:

•        What am I ahead or behind on?

•        How far ahead or behind am I?

•        What is the minimum work I have completed?

Each section of a business selects to track the different types of key performance indicators. It actually depends very much on the business goals, which are to be achieved. Let us take an example, to increase satisfaction of a customer towards different services, a call center plans up a goal to receive and provide their fruitful services to a definite number of calls in a specific period of time, which should be as shorter as it can to achieve more and more work . On the other hand, the sales department can make use of the key performance indicators to put the performance goals. This can be anything, such as the amount of calls made based on each month.

Usually a KPI list is used to generate a KPI, and then it is shown by using KPI Web Parts. These KPI lists are saved safely in the Report Center. Here any authorized person can reuse it. You can refer to the image shown below to understand the working principles of a key performance indicator in short.

 

Filter Web Parts

A filter permits you to view only some small part of the data (which is inside the original one), according to the interest shown by you. Let us take an example, a set of data can have the two years history of the different products for the whole region. The use of filters allows you to display the things, which are more meaningful, such as one sales region, or only the current year.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes ten Filter Web Parts. These allow you to you to choose the number of values you want to choose and do the modifications in the contents of Web Parts. Hence, the page displays exactly the information you want to display.

The Current User Filter Web Part has the feature of automatically filtering the information based on the person who is performing the work. This is very useful whenever someone wants to display data, such as customer tasks, which are currently given to that user.

You need to know another way of using filters. You can make use of filters to display a workbook and link that workbook to a filter. This permits one to select a product for which they want to know all the related information. Filter Web Part can also be linked with more than one Web Part. Thus, if different product is being chosen, then all the other Web Parts are updated.

Dashboards

Dashboards are tools, which are used for some useful work such as communicating status. Let us talk about an Office SharePoint Server 2007 dashboard. It is a Web page template, which allows you to gather and view the information from different sources such as charts and key performance indicators (KPIs).

To generate a dashboard page, you can make use of different Web Parts. One can also put that Web Parts to coexisting pages in the site. If you are building up a dashboard on a new page, it is always recommended to use a template to make it much faster. You can also put in or remove item and can do any of the required modifications related to the page layout and other appearances in the page after it is successfully generated.

The following Web Parts are included with the dashboard page template. More information can be found on the Microsoft website.

The WEB PART	Gives THE ABILITY for the following work
1.    Excel Web Access	In adding an Excel workbook or a worksheet.
2.    KPI List	It displays up a KPI List.
3.    Apply Filters (button)	It displays up the Apply Filters button.
4.    Related Information	Have links related to other items in the page.
5.    Summary	It describes the information about the plans and the status.
6.    Contact Details	It lists the name of the person to contact.

SharePoint Business Intelligence Part 1

 

 There are few new features in the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. These features are specifically meant for you to share and control the useful information regarding business. In this article, some of the new features are described giving a clear overview of the relation of these features to each other.

Overview (BI)

Years back, the tools for editing and approaching the data were available only to people having loads of experience in data mining. This data was meant to be analyzed. Then, publishing to the Web from different sources by using data was restricted only to developers. By making the use of the the new features in the Office SharePoint Server 2007, the information workers can gather and publish the data from different sources to Web.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 links to business applications, such as Siebel, and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and more, which allows you to make use of features like publishing of reports and key performance indicators.

On publishing reports from the data in a system, you are actually providing the strategic data for decision-makers. The example of reports may be a SQL Server Reporting Services report. The executives rely heavily on the on the accurate reports so that they can make informed decisions.

The Report Center is the main hub of the Office SharePoint Server 2007. The Report Center gives a central location. This central location can be used to store reports that are common to a group.

Report Center

As discussed in above lines, the Report Center site is a central hub for business-intelligence information. Here are some of the features of a report center site:

• It has libraries for storing reports and connections to an external data source.
• It gives you access to page templates and Web Parts, which helps in creating pages. These pages are filled with the information regarding business.
• In a Report Center, users can make a search for items by means of categorized structures and can approach to the relevant reports.

By default, one Report Center site is created under the top-level portal site. However, with the appropriate permissions, anyone can create a Report Center site within a team, department, or organization site.

The features discussed here are available in the Report Center site and any of the features can be used in any site within the Office SharePoint Server 2007. This gives you the option to decide the methodology you want to make use of to take benefits of the different features of the business intelligence. All this is done within the Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Excel Services

Excel Services allows one to save an Excel workbook on a server. It is then published on a Web page. Users can use any part of the workbook to do so. Users require a browser to interact with data and for displaying it too. The Excel Web Access (EWA) Web Part is responsible for publishing the workbook on the page.

One of the advantages of publishing workbooks is that all of the calculation now takes place on the server. Because of which, the business logic is always hidden in the workbook.

One more advantage is that there is just one copy of the workbook. It is stored in a secure and safer place.

Users can be given "view only" rights, which limits access to the workbook. It can be done with the Web page. For example, users can be stopped from opening up a workbook by using Excel.

A snapshot of a workbook can also be generated instead of publishing it in an interactive mode.