Microsoft's BI offering is built on an inclusive platform designed to encompass an entire business intelligence suite, while being fully integrated with its other product offerings, including Microsoft Dynamics (enterprise resource planning [ERP]) (for more information on Microsoft Dynamics see Microsoft's Dynamic New Approach to Professional Services Automation). Its BI product line includes online analytical processing (OLAP), extract, transform, and load (ETL), and reporting services, as well as providing front-end scorecarding functionality that integrates with SharePoint and Excel, making it an integrated approach to BI.
Business Scorecard Manager (BSM) 2005 sets and monitors key performance indicators (KPIs), allows teams to analyze issues based on metrics set, and allows users to drill down to data stored in the SQL Server to identify the structured and unstructured source data, in order to view more detailed information. BSM offers collaboration among users, personalized notification of status changes within a scorecard, task assignment to individuals based on KPI, and distribution of scorecards via email.
SharePoint Server 2007 provides a centralized Web portal for Microsoft's BI offerings. Information can be distributed across the organization to enable all employees to collaborate, edit, post, distribute, and reuse documents and information. Other applications using SharePoint can be leveraged as well, aligning BI with other business initiatives.
SQL Server 2005 RDBMS uses its SQL Server BI Development Studio as an integrated development environment (IDE) for the development of its BI applications. The BI Development Studio is a centralized tool to leverage multiple technologies such as OLAP, relational databases, reporting, Web pages, and Microsoft coding languages. It includes the following components:
* SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) provides ETL capabilities. In addition, data can be transformed without the use of staging tables, thereby reducing data latency. Both structured and unstructured data can be extracted and converted between various types of data such as numeric and string (and so on), and data audits can be performed. Also, to account for slowly changing dimensions (SCDs), SSIS has a built-in wizard.
* Analysis Services provides data mining and OLAP capabilities to enable users to identify and set KPIs, set custom aggregations and semi-additive measures, and create decision trees and perform regression analyses to identify forward-looking business needs. Unified Dimensional Model (UDM) uses one platform to address the needs of multiple dimensional models and relational reporting, creating a centralized structure improving the performance of summary type queries.
* Reporting Services provides advanced authoring tools to allow ad hoc and user report creation through the use of its Reporting Services Report Builder. Report Builder allows users to create reports from an existing business model, build new reports, modify existing reports, and build reports based on OLAP or relational database tables. Aside from the flexibility of its interactive reporting environment, Reporting Services leverages multiple data sources and provides the ability to embed its Web services architecture, to allow users the ability to collaborate on initiatives for Web-enabled reporting tools.
Additionally, MS Excel 2007 is the newest version of Excel that works with the BI platform identified above. It leverages performance management functionality within its structure by using SQL Server 2005 to embed heat graphs, KPIs, and so forth, allowing trends to be identified more easily. Excel spreadsheets can also be published to the SharePoint server to allow collaboration among various employees across the organization as well as interaction with real-time data that can be published to the server.
Business Scorecard Manager (BSM) 2005 sets and monitors key performance indicators (KPIs), allows teams to analyze issues based on metrics set, and allows users to drill down to data stored in the SQL Server to identify the structured and unstructured source data, in order to view more detailed information. BSM offers collaboration among users, personalized notification of status changes within a scorecard, task assignment to individuals based on KPI, and distribution of scorecards via email.
SharePoint Server 2007 provides a centralized Web portal for Microsoft's BI offerings. Information can be distributed across the organization to enable all employees to collaborate, edit, post, distribute, and reuse documents and information. Other applications using SharePoint can be leveraged as well, aligning BI with other business initiatives.
SQL Server 2005 RDBMS uses its SQL Server BI Development Studio as an integrated development environment (IDE) for the development of its BI applications. The BI Development Studio is a centralized tool to leverage multiple technologies such as OLAP, relational databases, reporting, Web pages, and Microsoft coding languages. It includes the following components:
* SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) provides ETL capabilities. In addition, data can be transformed without the use of staging tables, thereby reducing data latency. Both structured and unstructured data can be extracted and converted between various types of data such as numeric and string (and so on), and data audits can be performed. Also, to account for slowly changing dimensions (SCDs), SSIS has a built-in wizard.
* Analysis Services provides data mining and OLAP capabilities to enable users to identify and set KPIs, set custom aggregations and semi-additive measures, and create decision trees and perform regression analyses to identify forward-looking business needs. Unified Dimensional Model (UDM) uses one platform to address the needs of multiple dimensional models and relational reporting, creating a centralized structure improving the performance of summary type queries.
* Reporting Services provides advanced authoring tools to allow ad hoc and user report creation through the use of its Reporting Services Report Builder. Report Builder allows users to create reports from an existing business model, build new reports, modify existing reports, and build reports based on OLAP or relational database tables. Aside from the flexibility of its interactive reporting environment, Reporting Services leverages multiple data sources and provides the ability to embed its Web services architecture, to allow users the ability to collaborate on initiatives for Web-enabled reporting tools.
Additionally, MS Excel 2007 is the newest version of Excel that works with the BI platform identified above. It leverages performance management functionality within its structure by using SQL Server 2005 to embed heat graphs, KPIs, and so forth, allowing trends to be identified more easily. Excel spreadsheets can also be published to the SharePoint server to allow collaboration among various employees across the organization as well as interaction with real-time data that can be published to the server.
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