Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

16.2. Dashboards and Report Center

SharePoint offers multiple mechanisms for displaying business intelligence data. You have already seen Excel spreadsheets integrated in SharePoint pages with the Excel Services rendering engine. Now it is time to examine dashboards and the SharePoint Site Template, Report Center. As with the Excel and Excel Services content, this examination begins with coverage of some power user approaches to business intelligence and then dives into the APIs offered by Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Edition.

16.2.1. Dashboards

As I previously stated, a dashboard is a visual metaphor of the state and health of the business. A dashboard actually allows multiple applications to work together to display data in one page. A dashboard could be displaying data from SQL Reporting Services, the Business Data Catalog, and Excel Services at the same time. New SharePoint filter Web Parts allow data from multiple sources on a page to be filtered in many different ways. This could allow you to filter a dashboard view comprising SSAS and Excel Services data with a single drop-down.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 ships with a Report Center Site Template, a new Site Template optimized for easy report access and management. The Report Center includes a report library, a data connection library, and a dashboard template. However, any of these Web Parts, such as the dashboard elements and KPIs, can be placed on any page—you are not required to use the Report Center ...