What really is Sharepoint business intelligence (BI) and how can I use it?
Business intelligence is a essentially a stream-lined process to monitor and analyze the business as a whole to help dictate business process improvements in the future. Why would you need this? Well you want to monitor your business’s performance so that you can make changes in the near future. This of course must be done in a secure fashion with levels of authentication. What’s the solution?
Well Sharepoint!
Sharepoint makes your job easier with BI because it actually integrates with other services such as Oracle, SAP, etc. You can easily access this information, learn from it, and make the appropriate changes all in real time. To find if your particular business integration will be feasible with sharepoint, click this link here.
Sharepoint BI gives you access the following features:
Reporting almost on-demand- you get a central dashboard displaying all your custom metrics. This is displayed a webpage and information can be gathered from many various sources. Users have access to sharpeoint search functionality in case they are trying to find a key metric.
End User Investment – To determine the real ROI of your sharepoint implementation, sharepoint allows you to monitor how the business-users are using the platform.
Environment status information- Using sharepoint BI you can actually monitor the health of your servers and other hardware technology.
Microsoft Excel – This feature actually allows users to store excel documents on a server and then publish it on-demand as a web-page. For example, let’s say you have a sales-team and they are selling a IT hardware solution. The client wants to see what the costs will be of the hardware solution in their custom environment. You can simply publish a excel document that allows the salespeople to show a client a power and performance management calculator. They can input the data from the client and get a calculation without being able to edit the formulas that you have created for them.
Performance monitoring- Lets say your company has a goal. Sharepoint BI will give a performance indictor that can automatically calculate the progress toward that goal.
If you want to learn more about how this solution will work you environment, you can click here and see more.
Thanks!
Andy M