C H A P T E R  8

Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is all about allowing organizations to make intelligent business decisions based on collected data. The subject of business intelligence (BI) is vast, and you probably won't be surprised to hear that whole books have been written about it. So why include BI in a book about SharePoint 2010 administration? Simply because SharePoint Server 2010 contains many new BI offerings, including integrated PerformancePoint Services, which used to exist as a stand-alone Microsoft product. Although you will not find much information about the implementation of BI concepts or the use of OLAP cubes and data warehouses in this book, you can expect to read about configuration of SharePoint 2010 to support implementation of BI practice.

In this chapter, we will take a journey of discovery, installing PerformancePoint Services (PPS), Visio Services, and Excel Services. We will also take a tour of Business Connectivity Service (BCS)—the successor to the Business Data Catalog in SP2007.

Before diving in to BI, I want to point out that most if not all the BI features in SharePoint 2010 require an Enterprise license, although in some cases, you can get away with Standard. If you are using a Foundation version of SharePoint 2010, many of the steps and examples in this chapter will not work.