The Microsoft® Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server™ 2005 and the Microsoft® Business Intelligence Toolset

14.2. Data Warehouse and BI Documentation

We all seem to skimp on documentation in the run up to system deployment. It seems as though the business should be able to use the system without a ton of documentation. After all, we spent a lot of time and trouble organizing and naming things in a sensible way. The bad news here is that the team needs to do a lot of documentation of the system in order to offer a complete solution to the users.

The good news is most of the documentation is really metadata dressed up in presentable clothes. If you've been capturing metadata all along, much of the job now is to create a nice front end for users to access that metadata. If you've been ignoring the metadata issue, you've got a lot of work ahead of you.

As we detail in Chapters 8 and 9, the BI portal is the organization's single source for reporting and analysis and associated information. The main content of the BI portal will be the navigation hierarchy and the standard reports contained therein. Around the edges of the main BI portal page, users should find links to all the documentation and tools described here.

14.2.1. Core Descriptions

The first things to document are the data: the business process subject areas including facts and dimensions, and the tables, columns, calculations, and other rules that make up those subject areas. Standard reports and other BI applications should also be documented, though their documentation is often integrated with the reports themselves.

Business ...