Making Effective Business Decisions Using Microsoft Project

CHAPTER 10

INTELLIGENT BUSINESS PLANNING AND REPORTING USING MICROSOFT PROJECT 2010

IN THIS CHAPTER

We explore business intelligence options such as Excel Services, PowerPivot, and SQL Reporting Services to help you take some basic steps in moving toward the business intelligence reporting capabilities of Project Server. We also demonstrate some functional steps in creating Pivot Reports using Project Server 2010 data.

What You Will Learn

• A better understanding of the business intelligence options for Dynamic Reporting
• Some helpful steps for Pivot Reporting and Pivot Formatting
• The flexibility of Office Web applications and ways to leverage these for data accessibility
• How to leverage the collaborative Business Portal (SharePoint) to assist in empowering your social reporting and communications network

WHAT IS DYNAMIC REPORTING …

… and, for that matter, what is business intelligence (BI)? Depending on whom you ask, you might get different answers, and based on their personal context, they may all be right.

For our purposes, we'll use the next definition of BI:

Business Intelligence

A category of methodologies and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make business decisions.

Businesses have been doing some version of BI for years, so what's so special about the BI version? Dynamic Reporting is one of the answers to that question.

In traditional reporting methodologies, you'd make a request to the information technology ...