Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

8.3 Dashboards and Report Center Templates 171

Chapter 8

done, any KPIs that are defined in SQL are surfaced and their values are used

to determine how the SharePoint KPI is performing.

8.2.2 Displaying KPIs

You can navigate to your KPI list and view the items directly from there, but

it is more likely that you want to surface individual KPIs in Web Part pages,

along with other information pertinent to the task at hand. This is easily

done using one of the two KPI Web Parts. The first will show you all of the

KPIs in a list and allow you to choose different icons, such as traffic lights or

checkmarks. You can also filter the list to only show KPIs that are deemed as

problems. The second Web Part allows you to focus in on one KPI—this is

the Web Part that would generally be used to put a big red or green icon on a

page to focus the attention of the consumer, such as “your sales are down for

the month!” You can see both types of Web Parts in use in Figure 8.5.

Now let’s look at how we can use dashboards and reports to pull

together pertinent information from multiple sources, ultimately displaying

relevant information for the current user.

8.3 Dashboards and Report Center Templates

Dashboards are really just Web Part pages that are optimized for viewing fil-

tered business data that resides in workbooks, KPIs, SQL Server 2005 Analy-

sis Services, and so on.

SharePoint Server 2007 ships with a reports site template that is opti-

mized for connecting to business data and displaying it in dashboards. It is

also optimized to store dashboards and workbooks as reports, enabling fea-

tures such as a report history so that you can look at trends. It contains pre-

defined dashboards and supporting libraries, such as a data connection

Figure 8.5

KPIs in action.