SharePoint® 2007 and Office Development Expert Solutions

Chapter 7. Building Business Intelligence Applications with SharePoint and Office

As businesses collect data at a constantly increasing rate, the problem that most face isn't not getting enough data, but making the best use of what is available. In the past, business intelligence tools have been targeted at a narrow range of analyst users, but in a modern business, people in almost every role need these kinds of tools to analyze data and make good decisions.

A business intelligence (BI) platform is made up of several components, as shown in Figure 7-1.

Extract Transform Load (ETL) systems take data from source Line-of-Business systems to standardize and consolidate that data into a BI data store, which can be any combination of a data warehouse, departmental data mart, or OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) cube. In these reporting-focused data stores, the data is restructured to make reporting easier and more consistent. Key business calculations are performed and related data from disparate line-of-business systems are combined to enable business users to answer questions that span more than one application:

• A single enterprise data warehouse store can be an elusive goal due to the complexity and cost involved in taking on every perspective on the data.

• Therefore, it is common to take a more focused approach with departmental data marts targeted at specific types of questions and often a smaller subset of source systems.

• OLAP cubes are complementary storage technology designed to simplify ...