Business Intelligence in SharePoint 2010

A client asked me what KMA knew about SharePoint 2010's business intelligence capabilities.  As a good consultant is want to so, I did some research and I thought I'd share the summary with you.  Chris McNulty, KMA's SharePoint practice lead, gave a presentation on the topic at the SharePoint Saturday in San Diego in February.

This slide is a great summary of SharePoint's capabilities:

 
Here's my quick summary of some these tools:

• The SharePoint Chart Web part is a quick way to display data that can be stored in a SharePoint list or if you're more technically savvy in Excel or a data base.
• Excel services allows you to display peices of an Excel spreadsheet in a SharePoint web part.  You can even do pivottable-like slicing and dicing.  Excel skills are required, but not coding skills.
• Business Connectivity Services allows you to display data that's stored in a data base as a list in SharePoint.  You can even edit the data in the SharePoint list and it will write back to the data base.  This requires data base query skills and knowledge of SharePoint designer.
• PerformancePoint allows you to generate and display KPIs and drill down into the data using a decomposition tree.  You'll need skills in building data cubes to organize the data, but once it's in SharePoint users can do lots of fairly sophisticated analytics.

This is just a subset.  See Chris' PowerPoint deck for more details.  I'll leave you with one more visual from the deck to help you think about when to use the different tools:

 
 
 

Comments

[Sentri]

David, glad you liked the presentation! One other technique is the abilioty to host SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports insde a web part or a document library. The development overhead is small - usually much smaller than that for PerformancePoint cubes.