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Microsoft Business Intelligence for Higher Education

Provide everyone in your institution with the right information they need to make decisions using a Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) for Higher Education solution. It gives an intuitive and cost-effective way to enable all of your users to access and analyze information through familiar tools such as a Web browser, Microsoft Office Excel, and Microsoft Office SharePoint. With ready access to relevant data from virtually any source, your users can make better decisions and inform actions by tracking progress against key performance indicators (KPIs).

Solving Real-World Challenges

Microsoft BI solutions help Higher Education institutions:

• Unlock data trapped in application silos into an integrated data warehouse.
• Simplify complex relational models designed for transactional efficiency and data input into analytic cubes optimized for analytic efficiency and data insight.
• Extend the power of BI from the offices of specialists into the hands of those who take action.
• Add confidence to decision-making with data-backed evidence.
• Focus actions on the performance goals that matter most.
• Shift time spent accessing data to time spent analyzing your business.

Key Outcomes

Microsoft BI for Higher Education solutions can help you:

• Make better decisions. Inform routine decisions and long-range strategic planning across all business functions and disciplines with accurate, readily-available data.
• Use budgets more efficiently. Gain a better understanding of projected revenues and expenditures.
• Meet enrollment goals. Make it easy to analyze recruiting and retention data, grade and graduation trends, tuition discounting programs, and other information.
• Maximize funding opportunities. Improve responses to legislative and grant requests, compliance with the accreditation requirements, and tracking of top alumni donors.
• Increase student performance. Give faculty a clear picture of student performance at an individual or group level so they can adjust instruction accordingly.

Why Choose Microsoft for BI?

Traditional BI solutions focus on enabling a select few with expensive, specialty tools. Microsoft’s BI strategy is to enable breakthrough organizational results by bringing BI to the “masses” and equipping all employees with affordable, familiar tools that align an individual’s everyday actions with the organization’s long-term goals.

With Microsoft BI solutions, you benefit from:

• Reduced costs. Take advantage of your existing investments in Microsoft products, such as SQL Server and Microsoft Office.
• Rapid time to value: Connect with your ERP software (PeopleSoft, Datatel, Campus Management, and Banner) and many other data sources.
• Flexible functionality. Microsoft BI is simple enough for average users, yet robust enough for power users.
• Make better decisions. Data is delivered through familiar interfaces, such as Excel, so your users do not have to learn a whole new system—which means they will actually use it!
• High adoption rates. Get the technology and assistance you need from a Microsoft education partner you can trust.

Customer Success

Faced with a small IT staff, a limited budget, and a need to optimize its existing PeopleSoft ERP application and HEAT helpdesk platform, solving their data access problems could have been a daunting task for CSU. Adding complexity, it needed a BI solution that would not take two or three years to implement. Finally it had to be easy-to-use with minimal training since it would be deployed to 200 users across the organization. Their choice: Microsoft BI. Read the complete case study.

Capella University’s executive management team launched an initiative to improve the organization’s use of its data resources in order to better manage the performance of the university. Utilizing PerformancePoint Server 2007, the IT department could more easily put data into a cube format that provides a powerful mechanism to display hierarchies and relationships to end users, completely freeing the business side of the organization from the back-end data formatting process. Read the complete case study.