Glossary of SharePoint Development Terms
ad-hoc analysis: A technique of business analysis that seeks to answer questions as they arise. For example, you might start with a canned report but then have questions about a particular region. Ad-hoc analysis, as a feature, would let you drill into that region and categorize the data that the region contains, manipulating the data in real time.
Balanced Scorecard: A visual representation of a business strategy, designed to help an organization balance its progress toward a specific goal from four perspectives: business processes, financial health, customer management, and learning and growth. You can use any of several Microsoft products to build the visualizations needed for a Balanced Scorecard — not only services in SharePoint (such as PerformancePoint Services and SQL Server Reporting Services), but also client applications such as Excel. The visualizations serve as at-a-glance indicators. Compared to managing and monitoring an organization from the four perspectives, these indicators show only the tip of a very large iceberg.
business intelligence (BI): In general, the systematic, enterprise-wide use of networked computer software to get a handle on the mountains of data that flow into, through, and from a modern business. The raw data becomes information that’s used to run a business intelligently — in particular, to plan strategies (a use similar to that of military intelligence).
command-line interface (CLI): A simple user ...
