Microsoft's SharePoint has long since started providing users with the functionality of BI (business intelligence), but it's often necessary to introduce a bunch of assorted technologies to fit into the Microsoft model, look and feel, and then you need to put them together like "Frankenstein". SharePoint 2010 has changed this situation, bringing bi to a new level.
The main idea behind BI (Business Intelligence) is (to avoid becoming BS): You should collect data every day, hour, or even every second, and you need to do more than just monitor or record that data. You need to analyze the data, and you need to share that data, and today, someone has to be responsible for the data-not three months from now, and that information may not be worth anything to your company.
So today is the perfect time to promote business intelligence. At the right time, deliver the right information to the right person in the right way-that's what BI (business intelligence) needs to do. Its ultimate goal is to optimize the decision-making. Next, let me explain what the SharePoint Bi (business Intelligence) components specifically include, and what we can do with them.
In SharePoint 2010, the BI (Business Intelligence) tool includes Microsoft Excel, the PowerPivot add-in for Excel, Excel Services, Visio, and VI Sio Service, PerformancePoint Services, Builder, and Reporting Services, and some SQL Server components (including: SSRS SQL Server Reporti NG services), Integration Services, and Analysis Services.
Combining SharePoint with Excel or Visio allows customers to create workbooks or charts on SharePoint, and can easily share that information with others. In addition to this, Excel and Visio services can collect the most current data from a variety of data sources to update and refresh data. So, your workbooks or Visio diagrams are built on dynamic data and need not be manually adjusted.
Free PowerPivot combines an Excel plug-in with a SQL Server 2008 R2 plug-in to enhance Excel's functionality, which allows users to "self-service" analysis and bi on large datasets (business Intelligence) Collaboration.
PerformancePoint Services lets you build rich dashboard that can get data from a variety of data sources (such as SharePoint lists, relational data warehouses, OLAP cubes, and Excel Services). Dashboard can include scorecard, reports and KPIs (key performance indicators), which provides a global view of Business Analytics.
Compared with its "predecessor" version 2007, PerformancePoint 2010 has made a lot of improvements. The biggest improvement is that it is no longer running as a separate server, and now it is part of the Enterprise SharePoint product. It has abandoned the iis/sql structure of the past, and now it can use SharePoint document libraries and content store lists. This design change helps to make a better backup/recovery strategy, and it can be enhanced with SharePoint's authentication policy.
The new PerformancePoint Services has enhanced the scorecard and reporting, and now has built-in Drill-down functionality that allows you to access information more quickly, and some computing metrics allow you to create calculations using multiple data sources. You can look at variance metrics to see what difference there is between your target and your actual value, which can identify problems and risks as early as possible. Decomposition Tree is a feature that comes with the original version of ProClarity, and when you analyze the data, it helps you keep the best performance at the top of the trees, and now it's a visual type of report.
For me, the BI (Business Intelligence) feature of SharePoint 2010 is definitely more "sticky" than the SharePoint 2007 version. What do you think? Have you started using the BI (Business Intelligence) feature of SharePoint 2010? How do they compare to other tools you've used?
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