SharePoint Server 2007 Business Intelligence
The preparation, deployment, and sharing of business intelligence presents challenges, particularly in large organizations. Office SharePoint Server 2007 introduces business intelligence capabilities, allowing information workers throughout an organization to make more informed decisions, analyze and view data, and share business data with others. It includes a host of capabilities and provides new features to extend the capacities of corporate Web sites in deploying business intelligence information.
Web-Based Business Intelligence Using Excel Services
Delivering advanced analytic capabilities for business intelligence applications from a centralized server usually requires considerable effort in server-based application development; this effort is often redundant for many analysts and knowledge workers who have the required business intelligence analysis contained within their own desktop environments that use Office Excel. Excel Services empowers these users to publish and run spreadsheets on the server, enabling users to access these spreadsheets through a Web browser without the need for any custom browser components. The server performs all data access and analytic functions, enabling efficient processing and ensuring that all views of shared documents are generated from a centralized source. Fully interactive, data-bound spreadsheets — including charts, tables, and PivotTable® views — can be created as part of a portal, dashboard, or business scorecard, without requiring any custom server development. As part of this experience, Office SharePoint Server integrates flexible spreadsheet publishing with Office Excel 2007. Office Excel 2007 enables a fully integrated publishing experience, enabling authors to determine the target locations for the publishing of their spreadsheets, from the desktop to the corporate Web. Knowledge workers and analysts can publish Excel spreadsheets directly to SharePoint libraries, with the following capabilities:
1. Create a new document workspace If the author of the worksheet has the rights to do so, a new workspace can be created on the Office SharePoint Server 2007 to allow sharing and collaboration on the document.
2. Save to a document library The document can be saved directly to an existing Excel document library that the author has rights to access.
3. Specify Excel Services options The author can specify which parts of a spreadsheet are available for viewing and editing by other users.
The author has the ability to direct the publication of spreadsheets to the appropriate locations on the corporate Web, while exercising control over the documents — perhaps to control embedded logic, perhaps to protect sensitive information. These published documents can be accessed by authorized users via the Web browser or the full Office Excel 2007 client software. Modeling logic, proprietary information, and private data can be protected. The publishing process is tightly integrated into the Office Excel 2007 client.
Additional business intelligence features of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include:
• Integrated business intelligence dashboards Office SharePoint Server 2007 enables the creation of rich, interactive business intelligence dashboards that assemble and display business information from disparate sources by using built-in Web Parts such as dynamic key performance indicators, Excel spreadsheets, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services reports, or a collection of business data connectivity Web Parts that can visualize information residing in back-end line-of-business applications.
• Report Center A site optimized for report access and management, including a report library, a data connection library, and a dashboard template. These sites, hosted by the new Report Center, provide consistent management of reports, spreadsheets, and data connections.
• Key performance indicators Key performance indicators (KPIs) communicate goals and status to drive results. By using the KPI Web Part, a user can create a KPI list within a Web Part page, without writing code. The KPI Web Part can display KPIs from Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, Excel spreadsheets, SharePoint lists, or manually entered data.
• Filter Web Parts Filters enable dashboards to be personalized by communicating shared parameters among Web Parts on a dashboard. The parameters passed can be automatically applied based on user profiles, SharePoint lists, the Business Data Catalog, manually entered information, and so forth.