Whether you are a SQL Server business intelligence (BI) developer or a SharePoint Administrator,
this book shows you how Microsoft is delivering on its commitment to provide useful, usable BI to
its customers. It provides a quick dive into new Microsoft SharePoint 2010 BI features and offerings
as well as new SQL Server BI offerings.
The book provides a getting started guide for each of the SharePoint application services dedicated
to BI. Additionally, the book introduces features for managing SQL Server 2010 Reporting
Services reports and Excel 2010 PowerPivot add-in reports in SharePoint.
The SharePoint Server 2010 application services that provide self-service BI include:
? Excel Services A Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 service application that you can use to
manage, view, interact, and consume Microsoft Excel client workbooks on SharePoint Server.
? PerformancePoint Services A performance management service that you can use to
monitor and analyze your business. This service provides flexible, easy-to-use tools for building
dashboards, scorecards, reports, and key performance indicators (KPIs).
? Visio Services A service that allows users to share and view Visio diagrams on a SharePoint
website. This service also enables you to refresh and update data-connected Microsoft Visio
2010 diagrams from a variety of data sources.
? PowerPivot A SharePoint 2010 application service (included in SQL Server 2008 R2) and an
extension to Excel that adds support for large-scale data. It includes an in-memory data store
as an option for Analysis Services. Multiple data sources can be merged to include corporate
databases, worksheets, reports, and data feeds. You can publish Excel documents to Share-
Point Server 2010.
SharePoint administrators, business users, and BI developers, as well as other users and consumers of
BI, will want to understand each of these services and how they work together to bring BI to more
people through SharePoint.
