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Planning a SharePoint 2010 Implementation of a Business Intelligence Strategy 11-5
• Explain the data management and access issues that are relevant to BI design.
• Plan how to implement BI in SharePoint 2010.


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11-6 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Goals of Business Intelligence

Key Points
There are a range of definitions of BI, so it is probably more useful to assess the
goals of BI instead. In this way, you can more fully understand what you should
achieve through your solution design.
There are three key goals:
• Self-service and personal business intelligence.
• Business intelligence for the community.
• Organizational business intelligence.

Self-Service and Personal BI
The goal of self-service and personal BI is to ensure that users can provide their
own BI services. Usually, it involves personal productivity facilities such as
Microsoft Office, in addition to access to back-end data sources such as SQL Server
or other database software. Users, usually information workers, can format and
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Planning a SharePoint 2010 Implementation of a Business Intelligence Strategy 11-7
analyze data to generate business logic models that help them make decisions. This
involves little or no ongoing effort from the IT department.
Business Intelligence for the Community
The goal of BI for the community is the ability to analyze data in a collaborative
environment. The aim is to create teams who can combine effort and therefore

produce more complex or better informed business models. This requires a more
sophisticated approach to business systems, but has the major benefit of
eradicating silos of business information that are outside the control of the
business. Eradicating such silos is the most common goal of BI implementations.
Therefore, a solution architect must identify opportunities for teams to share
common information to make corporate decisions. A good example of how this
extends personal BI is exhibited by the difference between Microsoft Excel® 2010
and Excel Services. Excel 2010 provides personal productivity, whereas Excel
Services provides a truly collaborative environment.
This approach creates a homogeneous data environment where both local
information, such as Excel workbooks, and corporate data are used in a coherent
manner across an organization. This usually involves greater input from IT services
through the provision of collaborative tools, but the power of how to use
information remains with information worker teams.
Organizational Business Intelligence
Organizational BI extends the use of business data beyond individual or team
usage and creates a strategic model for business operation. The company goals are
reflected in the use of data, with BI tools generating preanalyzed output that aligns
with organizational goals. As a superset of the model of BI for the community,
information workers can continue to collaborate on data analysis, but work is
placed in the context of the overarching business strategy. This model commonly
uses key performance indicators (KPIs), dashboards, and scorecards to publish
achievements or targets. This model has the added benefit of enforcing governance
across the business at a day-to-day level.
This approach often requires a lot of architectural and developmental effort from
the IT department, based on business requirements from BI stakeholders and the
organization’s management team.
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11-8 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Identifying Business Intelligence Opportunities


Key Points
As a solution architect, it is essential that you can reconcile business requirements
with opportunities for the use of BI. This does not mean that you must use BI.
Rather, you must recognize when BI, and specifically the SharePoint 2010 BI
toolset, is appropriate to your design. Here are some examples of requirements
that should trigger a review of SharePoint 2010 BI components:
• Deliver user autonomy. If business stakeholders and users identify self-service as
a key requirement, you should investigate their goals and reasons for this. The
goal should be to enable users to more quickly generate business solutions
through closer collaboration and accessibility to back-end corporate data. You
should avoid the need to involve the IT department in protracted systems
design projects. One of the key benefits of BI is that it enables information
workers to have structured and managed access to corporate information
when they need it. Be careful of the goal of unilateral independence from the
IT department; sometimes users feel that the IT department is a blocker to BI,
rather than an enabler.
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Planning a SharePoint 2010 Implementation of a Business Intelligence Strategy 11-9
• Share Excel workbooks through browsers. The ability to work collaboratively on
Excel workbooks has previously involved saving a workbook on a shared drive
so that others can access it. This is still possible with SharePoint 2010, and has
the obvious advantages of version control and check-in and check-out from
document libraries. SharePoint 2010 Excel Services enables users to view and
interact with Excel 2010 workbooks through a browser, which is the key
benefit. This browser functionality, together with Web Part visualization,
means that users can now work collaboratively wherever they are and without
the need to have the client license for Excel 2010.
• Deploy dashboards. Business dashboards enable you to deploy BI information
to both BI and non-BI users through an onscreen Web Part. You should review

requirements to identify where stakeholders need information delivered
directly to users, too, rather than just for their own analysis.
• Deploy status indicators and KPIs. Status indicators and KPIs give the
information worker a current view of performance. This is only deliverable
with a connected system because you must have access to back-end data
sources to ensure that the status reflects current business achievements.
• Generate business scorecards. Business scorecards provide overall view of status
indicators. They are modeled after the business, not the data, to reflect goals.
These may be included as part of a dashboard.
• Enable business process visualization. For environments such as process
industries that map complex processes in Microsoft Visio® 2010, you should
investigate whether these are required just for Visio users or for a wider
audience. This is especially the case when Visio diagrams are connected to
back-end data systems that monitor or manage business processes.
• Create a central reporting location. Identify whether users want a centralized
reporting environment. Deploying single instances of reports minimizes the
effort that is wasted in user generation of multiple versions of the same
information.
• Provide central management for external data connections. Assess the need for
central management of connections to back-end business data sources. If your
environment has a range of complex data access requirements, you should
review the opportunities to create a managed set of data connections that are
made available to users. This minimizes duplication of effort and makes
solution deployment faster.

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11-10 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Data Security Management in Corporate Business
Intelligence


Key Points
When you are designing a BI deployment strategy for SharePoint 2010, you must
ensure that you look at how your organization manages data, in addition to
matching BI tools to requirements. Most companies have an overarching BI
strategy, which includes elements such as data compliance and security. For your
design to succeed, you must fit the SharePoint 2010 solutions into this strategy.
Organizational Compliance
The security component requires that you understand the company-wide
standards for security, such as:
• Protocols. Which security protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, and so on) are used in
your organization and does SharePoint 2010 support them?

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Planning a SharePoint 2010 Implementation of a Business Intelligence Strategy 11-11
• Authentication. Does your organization want to implement a single sign-on
(SSO) approach, with authentication transferred through a given methodology
between different platforms?
• Management. How does your environment manage personal credentials?

Security Integration
From a systems management perspective, it is important to aggregate the security
mechanisms of various platforms. Each is likely to have its own implementation of
data security, so you must understand which platforms and methodologies can
integrate with SharePoint 2010. You can deliver a range of security and
authentication implementations in SharePoint 2010, such as classic or claims. You
must plan to implement the correct security implementation for your Web
applications.
Seamless User Experience
Your users employ various systems, so they almost certainly want to minimize the
need for multiple logon credentials. This is critical for a BI implementation because

the goal is to provide a seamless flow of information and authentication.
SharePoint 2010 delivers claims-based security and the Secure Store Service, which
enables you to provide security accreditation across systems without intervention
from users in the form of additional logons.
Central Control
In your BI plan, you must also establish the responsibilities of IT and deployed
administration control of security. SharePoint security is, by default, centralized,
which offers coordinated security management. You can also delegate security
administration to departmental groups to minimize IT intervention and maximize
effective response to users.
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11-12 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Planning the Implementation of BI in SharePoint

Key Points
SharePoint 2010 improved BI options over those that were previously available in
Office SharePoint Server 2007. New options include PerformancePoint Services,
and enhancements to existing options include Excel Services. In addition, some BI
solutions are available that are not directly SharePoint 2010 solutions, such as
Excel 2010, which remains the most popular BI user tool.
When you create a design, you must map BI solutions to your business
requirements. These should relate to the three principal goals:
• Self-service and personal business intelligence.
• Business intelligence for the community.
• Organizational business intelligence.

Self-Service and Personal Business Intelligence
In the area of personal business productivity, use the essentially personal tools
such as Excel 2010 (optionally with PowerPivot) and Visio 2010. These can draw
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Planning a SharePoint 2010 Implementation of a Business Intelligence Strategy 11-13
information from external systems, but do not necessarily provide collaborative
environments. It is possible to share output from these and, in the case of Excel
2010, provide input to BI components such as Status Indicator Web Parts, but only
one worker at a time can use them.
For these types of files, you may need to deploy centralized metadata tagging in
SharePoint 2010 through custom content types and columns. These can
implement business standards through workflows and the document information
panel. You may also implement report standardization by provisioning Report
Builder.
Business Intelligence for the Community
In the collaborative sector, use the SharePoint BI tools such as Excel Services and
the Visio Graphics Service. These are collaborative tools that provide information
to the wider user population through a browser-based user interface (UI). If you
need to make workbooks available for multiuser updates, a possible solution is
using Excel Services rather than Excel 2010. Using the Visio Graphics Service, you
can make the function and business logic in Visio drawings available to all users of
the SharePoint 2010 environment.
PerformancePoint Services straddles the divide between community and
organizational productivity. You may deploy PerformancePoint Services for a
group or individuals to use to create BI solutions, such as dashboards or
workflows, which are useful for personal or team productivity.
SQL Server Reporting Services is a SQL Server function, but you can deploy it
through SharePoint 2010. Lesson 4, Planning for Reporting and Presentation,
discusses this more fully.
Organizational Business Intelligence
PerformancePoint Services is an essential tool for organizational BI. It enables you
to design and deploy centralized BI solutions, such as dashboards and KPIs, across
the user environment.


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11-14 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Lesson 2
Planning Data Access by Using BCS

Although BCS is not usually included in the core BI tools in SharePoint 2010, it is
an integral component for integrating LOB data with SharePoint applications. If
back-end data integration is a key business requirement for your users, it is almost
certain that you will need to implement BCS. You should review such integration
in the widest terms, because BCS is also used in search and social computing
solutions.
For a SharePoint 2010 BI environment, it is essential to plan your data access
strategy because issues over failed access or overly complex authentication
configuration have often impacted BI implementations. SharePoint 2010 provides
BCS, which provides data access to users and SharePoint applications beyond the
traditional BI solutions of Excel Services.
Objectives
After completing this lesson, you will be able to:
• Describe the key components and functions of BCS.