• Drive business performance

• Deliver intelligence through Microsoft Office

• Manage your Business Intelligence infrastructure

Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI), is a complete set of client, server and developer products that consists of the 2007 Microsoft Office system and SQL Server 2008; tightly integrated to support all facets of decision-making. Because of this tight integration and the proven capabilities and scalability of the SQL Server 2008 platform, you can count of Microsoft BI to deliver mission-critical information throughout your organization.

Drive business performance

Track and analyze financial, operational, customer, and human resource information across the organization providing people with the right information at the right time in an easy-to-use format.

• Scorecarding and Dashboarding. Expands the reach of business intelligence and brings every employee into the performance management process through personalized Web-based scorecards.
• Analytics. Empowers business users to make better, faster decisions through advanced analytic and data visualization capabilities.

Business Scorecard Manager 2005 and ProClarity Analytics provide deep, contextual, actionable insight. View a larger image.

 Top of Page

Deliver intelligence through Microsoft Office

Develop advanced analysis using Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets.

• Use familiar analysis tools. Microsoft BI delivers information on the desktop in the familiar and easy-to-use Microsoft Office environment. Easily incorporate information from virtually any data source available across the enterprise including data warehouses and enterprise applications.
• Perform advanced analysis. Using Office Excel 2007, which includes faster performance, significantly increased spreadsheet capacity, intuitive formula authoring using business terms, and advanced sorting and filtering, Microsoft BI supports advanced analysis that can lead to insight and better decision-making.
• Improve spreadsheet analysis. With Excel Services and SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services, the live connection to the data source exposes metadata, dimensions, and metrics in understandable business terms. It’s easy to modify reports and refresh data to help ensure up-to-the-minute accuracy.
• Share, manage, and control worksheets. Share business data broadly and confidently. Excel Services performs server-side calculations and provides access to data and analytics in real time through interactive dynamic HTML-rendered Excel spreadsheets. Maintain and efficiently share one centralized version of the truth while helping to protect sensitive or proprietary information. Shield information embedded in documents (for example, financial models) by limiting access to portions of the spreadsheet through new server-based access controls.
• Develop Excel-based business intelligence. Excel Services empowers spreadsheet authors to easily and broadly share spreadsheets that take advantage of the new business intelligence functionality of Office Excel 2007 through a Web browser. Create fully interactive data-bound spreadsheets, including charts, tables, and PivotTable views, as parts of a portal, dashboard, or business scorecard without any custom coding.
• Reuse spreadsheet models in application development. Separating the work of development from the work of business analysis not only makes maintenance easy, it also lowers development costs. Streamline development by using Excel Services within Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 pages and call business models in spreadsheets directly from applications through Web services. Because Excel Services empowers business users to create robust solutions without developer involvement and also provides multiple ways for developers to take advantage of and reuse business logic and reports created by business experts, you gain robust, extensible, and scalable applications with enhanced security, while saving time and money.

Excel Services with a key performance indicators (KPIs) list. View a larger image.

 Top of Page

Manage your Business Intelligence infrastructure

Deploy business intelligence on a proven, scalable, industry-leading platform.

• Take advantage of powerful data integration. SQL Server 2008 Integration Services (SSIS) performs complex integration, transformation, and synthesis at high speeds for very large data volumes. Fully programmable, embeddable, and extensible, SSIS is an ideal extract-transform-load (ETL) platform.
• Build complex analytical models to include with your business applications. The data mining and online analytical processing (OLAP) capabilities of SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services make data mining more accessible in an environment with enhanced security.
• Build a complete and comprehensive reporting solution. Use SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services to create, manage, and deliver both traditional, printed high-fidelity reports and interactive, presentation-quality Web-based reports. Quickly and easily build ad-hoc reports using Report Builder.
• Benefit from the more secure, scalable, and highly available relational database engine. In the SQL Server 2008 relational database management system, you get improved performance and support for structured and unstructured XML data, as well as proven high availability and performance.
• Use a familiar and rich development environment. Tight integration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 provides developers with a platform that enables productive and collaborative development of dependable solutions.

Business Intelligence Development Studio interface in Visual Studio. View a larger image.

 Top of Page