SharePoint® 2010 Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer

13

Developing and Deploying PowerPivot Analytics Applications

The end goal of most Business Intelligence projects is to provide data in an easy-to-understand and easy-to-access way for end users to make decisions. No other Business Intelligence tool can fulfill these requirements more than PowerPivot. PowerPivot provides extreme computation power inside a tool that most end users are familiar with and would prefer as their data visualization tool anyway: Excel.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB

PowerPivot can function in two capacities. The first method is PowerPivot for Excel, which is a standalone application. Users can develop high-powered in-memory analytics on their personal machines, which are all self-contained using highly efficient compression algorithms. If users want to share what they have created with others, that leads to the second method, PowerPivot for SharePoint.

PowerPivot for SharePoint allows users to share data models and analysis in a centralized location so the power of the tool is no longer restricted to an end user's desktop. In Lesson 8 you learned how to configure and install PowerPivot for integration with SharePoint 2010 using SQL Server 2008 R2. That lesson set the stage for this one, where you start learning how to develop PowerPivot content and then deploy it to SharePoint.

SQL Server Analysis Services shares many similar features with PowerPivot, but is thought to be a more Enterprise-ready tool, meaning it has additional functionality and ...