The Microsoft® Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server 2008 R2 and the Microsoft® Business Intelligence Toolset, Second Edition

Chapter 12. The BI Portal and SharePoint

Thinking outside the box.

Reporting Services and PowerPivot bring significant functionality to the BI user community. However, these are not the complete solution to the problem of delivering business value. As you add more and more reports and analyses to the DW/BI system, you will need to provide some means for organizing and structuring them. This is the role of the BI portal. The BI portal is the primary starting point in the information quest for a large part of the business community. It needs to be structured in a way that allows people to find what they are looking for within an ever increasing number of reports and analyses. Ideally, it will be more than just a directory structure; it will provide additional useful features such as search, customization, collaboration, metadata access, and user support.

For many smaller organizations, the Report Manager component of Reporting Services, along with basic web development skills, can be made to serve as a crude BI portal. However, DW/BI teams who want to provide rich portal experience, especially in larger organizations, will need a portal environment to serve as the BI portal platform.

SharePoint is Microsoft's offering in the portal and web-based application platform category. Microsoft has chosen SharePoint 2010 to serve as the hosting environment for several BI related components, including Reporting Services, Excel Services, PowerPivot, Office Web Applications, Visio Services, and ...