SharePoint® 2010 Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer

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Why SharePoint for Business Intelligence?

The question you might be asking yourself is “What can SharePoint do for my Business Intelligence efforts?” In reality you should be asking “How does the new feature set in SharePoint 2010 mesh with the ways my users want to analyze data and improve their understanding of their business operations?”

Let's examine that second question. SharePoint 2010 has a plethora of new features, as shown in Figure 1-1. The goal of this lesson is to introduce you to the areas of SharePoint that will catapult your Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities and give you a number of new ways for your users to analyze data, manage that analysis, and customize the delivery to internal and external customers. By helping you identify the questions to ask, and how best to think through the answers, this first lesson will help you recognize how SharePoint will complete your Business Intelligence solution.

Business Intelligence in an organization should be focused on the following:

• Increased insight into business processes
• Presenting data in a form the business users will understand and be able to apply
• Understanding of business performance based on consistent metrics
• Better communication between teams due to a single version of the truth
• Improved meeting efficiency because strong reporting and actionable intelligence drives better organizational focus

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