Reporting and Analysis
It's likely that the people in your organization are inundated with data—from formal information from structured sources to RSS feeds, information in e-mails, numbers from Wall Street, and on and on.
It's a constant struggle to provide people with tools to report on and analyze all that information while remaining focused on constantly moving business targets. People need access to the right information at the right time and to decision-making tools that fit their work processes.
To see how Microsoft business intelligence (BI) can help, consider how traditional BI solutions are tied to the ERP system or the data warehouse. They are outside the flow of a person's daily tasks. They don't empower people to take advantage of all the information they have at hand when making decisions. So people turn to informal systems and try to pull it together on their own.
Reporting and Analysis for All the Places Data Lives
People need a way to rationalize all the data they encounter every day. Microsoft BI provides you with the reporting and analysis tools and technologies to capture both structured and unstructured information:
- Reporting: Microsoft BI offers three ways of making your reporting a success:
- Enterprise reporting: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services offers a comprehensive, server-based solution that includes traditional managed reports, interactive reports, and embedded reports.
- Ad hoc reporting: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services includes Report Builder, a tool that helps securely connect business users to data so they can explore the relational data and create and update reports with ease.
- Management reporting: Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, building on the capabilities of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services and Microsoft Office Excel 2007, can help your organization manage all aspects of complex reporting.
- Analysis: Microsoft BI analysis tools are integrated with the rest of the BI platform to help you transform data into insight. For example, you can easily move from monitoring a scorecard or reading a report right into an analysis of the same information. When you see a problem, you can dive right in. When you want to take action, you can discover hidden opportunities.
Microsoft BI makes these tools available through its comprehensive, integrated offering.
Related Resources
Case Studies
- EMI Music
Music company enhances efficiency and effectiveness of digital-supply-chain performance reporting and boosts sales with Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 and Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003.
- ABS-CBN Interactive (ABSi)
Wireless services firm generates customer-specific recommendations and doubles response rates from marketing campaigns with a data mining solution based on Microsoft SQL Server 2005.
