SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 15. Business Intelligence and SharePoint

Introduction

One of the many reasons to create an enterprise portal is to collect in one place all of the information necessary to make key decisions. Imagine if a product manager can see a sales report, a marketing analysis, the communication strategy, and the status of development on a new product line all on one page. The product manager can quickly look at all the relevant information and statistics to determine whether the product is on time, on budget, and still fits the target market. This concept is known as business intelligence, or having the right data at the right time in front of the right people to make the right decisions.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a significant component in Microsoft's overall Business Intelligence solution. MOSS 2007 has a variety of tools to take large amounts of unstructured data and organize that information in a single, easy-to-use interface. This makes it relatively simple to have important documents, reports, and newsfeeds at your fingertips, assisting you in making corporate decisions.

The Business Intelligence (BI) features in SharePoint 2007 allow you to locate, manage, modify, and share data from many diverse sources, as well as store and present that data later in different presentations.

The new BI utilities in MOSS 2007 give everyone the tools to create meaningful analyses. No longer do developers or warehousing and data mining experts have to struggle with accessing vast ...