Planning for business intelligence adoption - Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 - page 27

must be integrated into a SharePoint farm to use Power View or can run independently if you do not
want to use Power View or SharePoint. All these services require IT support to install and configure
the environment.
In organizational BI solutions, business users tend to be consumers of published content rather
than contributors. Content contributors are usually BI developers, IT professionals, and in some cases,
power analysts. The prevailing concept in organizational BI is to centralize content by using defined
standards for layout, naming conventions, and color schemes. This BI can be consumed as is or can
be used as base components by power users who aggregate these with other content suitable for a
targeted audience.
Each of the tools discussed in this section solves specific problems for organizational BI, starting
with the most commonly implemented tool. The following descriptions of each tool aren't intended
to be comprehensive; they focus on the features that address specific challenges that organizations
face when implementing BI.
Reporting Services Many organizations start with standard reports by implementing Reporting
Services. If it's set up to run in SharePoint integrated mode, Reporting Services relies on the same
security model and centralized storage that SharePoint uses, which makes it easier to administer.
Report administrators can control how reports execute to balance performance against timeliness of
data by setting up a report to run on demand to view current data or to use caching to execute it in
advance and minimize the wait time for viewing. Users access reports by using a supported browser—
Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox on a computer running a Windows operating system, or
Apple Safari on a computer running a Mac operating system.
Having reports available in a SharePoint document library also makes it easier for business users
to find information for online viewing. Users have only one place to go for all corporate informa-
tion, whether that information is in the form of Reporting Services reports, Excel workbooks, or other
content. The interface is simple for users to access because reports are stored like any other content
on the SharePoint server, making it a good option for information delivery to a wide audience of
casual users. (Even if you run Reporting Services in native mode—without SharePoint Server 2013—
the interface remains easy to use.) As an alternative, reports can be sent directly to users via email as
often as necessary.
Reporting Services is also popular for its ability to produce pixel-perfect reports. The report
author, typically an IT professional, has a high degree of control over the appearance and behavior of
report elements to produce just the right layout, whether users view the report online or export it to
another format. Also, with some advance thought about the types of questions that a user might ask
when viewing a report, the report author can build in parameters for filtering and can add interactive
features that lead the user to additional answers.
Crossing over into the team and personal BI communities, Reporting Services also supports a
variety of export formats so that any user can save the report in a print-ready format such as a Por-
table Document Format (PDF) file or to incorporate information into a Microsoft Word document.
Moreover, the user can reuse the information in a report simply by using a Web Part to include it in a
dashboard. Users with more advanced skills can export report data for further analysis into Excel, or