Bringing it all together - Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 - page 309

CHAPTER 10

Bringing it all together

Users in companies and organizations often need to gain insights from data across many different

sources. They might need to look at sales data alongside orders data or forecast data. Although
the requirement itself seems straightforward, the data often resides in many different places, or the
people who analyze the data perform that analysis in different ways, using different products. You
don't always have a clear one-size-fits-all answer to the question of which product to use to best visu-
alize a particular data source. You might also need to determine which product to use based on the
maturity of an organization, its capabilities, or simply the user's comfort level with the technology.

For example, one user might use Reporting Services to show insights about customer trends,
and another might use Excel Services to show how a particular customer segment lines up with cost
projections. Management in the organization might actually want to see both analyses alongside one
another to help answer a business-critical question. The simplest way to do this would be to allow
these products to work in a side-by-side fashion, providing integrated views of the data rather than
forcing yet another user to copy each BI report and regenerate it by using a single tool.

One of the strengths of Microsoft SharePoint is that it gives users the ability to bring data and
insights from different products together in a holistic way. Whether the data comes from a SQL
Server data source, from an Analysis Services cube or Analysis Services tabular model, from within a
SharePoint list, from a Microsoft Excel file, or from any one of a number of other places, the Microsoft
business intelligence (BI) stack with SharePoint gives you the tools to easily view insights from the
various data sources in a single, integrated view. BI developers can choose to use any of the products
described in this topic because, through SharePoint, all the products can deliver side-by-side analyses
to help business users gain deeper insights while still allowing individual users to use the products
that make the most sense to them, based on the specific data being used or on their comfort level
with a particular product or technology.

Dashboards

The concept of a dashboard is probably very familiar to most readers. At the simplest level, a dash-
board brings visualizations of data and status together into a single place so that users can easily—
usually at a glance—view how particular business efforts are doing. Dashboards are suitable for many
different purposes, including measuring status against goals, monitoring progress, and managing
business process. The best dashboards provide a way to take action on the information they show,
such as quickly sending an alert or email to the right individual if something needs to be done.