Microsoft® Business Intelligence For Dummies®

Chapter 10. SharePoint Shines

In This Chapter

• Understanding SharePoint

• Knowing how SharePoint delivers business intelligence

• Setting free human BI with SharePoint

• Discovering what's new in SharePoint 2010

I'm a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they're interested in.

—Bill Gates

Microsoft has positioned SharePoint as the premier software product for business communication and collaboration; it's designed for the networked enterprise and for the Web. Business intelligence (BI) is about using that connectivity to run your business in the most efficient and effective manner possible. Information and data come from all aspects of a business, and collaboration and communication are key components to helping a business use the information and data it gathers. The core BI system that SQL Server provides is accessible through SharePoint — which allows everyone in an entire organization to communicate and collaborate, regardless of where team members are in the world.

As BI and collaboration continue to grow as hot topics, SharePoint has become one of the most successful products Microsoft has ever produced. But it's also a complex product with many valuable features and functions; those end up combined in so many ways that people think of SharePoint as just the feature set they're most familiar with using — and there's a lot more to it, as this chapter ...