Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint

Chapter 17. Deploying to SharePoint

Sharing with Your Team

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Philosophers have debated this question since early in the 1700s. The key to this highly philosophical question is whether an object only exists if it perceived.

At this point, you have created a strong and streamlined business intelligence solution that allows you to gather insight from your data, but it exists only on your local PC. To increase the impact of this solution, you’ll need to share it with your team or larger enterprise.

With the SQL Server 2008 R2 release, Microsoft introduced PowerPivot, and the term Business Intelligence Continuum was coined to describe the range of solutions starting with personal BI, progressing to team BI, and then to organizational BI. Figure 17-1 shows the range of these solutions and their division across PowerPivot and SQL Server Analysis Services. In the SQL Server 2012 release, the addition of tabular cubes to the story makes it even better.

Figure 17-1. Microsoft BI solution stack

In this chapter, we walk through the deployment story from PowerPivot for Excel to PowerPivot for SharePoint. This allows us to take a personal BI solution that was created and managed in Microsoft Excel and promote it to a team BI solution hosted in Microsoft SharePoint. In Chapter 18, we will continue the journey and promote ...