Sharepoint Consulting Business Intelligence Tools

SharePoint Business Intelligence

B.I.

BI Start

PowerPivot

SQL

Reports

BI Planning & Deployment

One of the most important parts of SharePoint is native business intelligence. No longer do you need to set up lots of core infrastructure or buy third-party components.

We Offer and Support:

Excel Services
PerformancePoint
Reporting Services
Visio Services
Business Connectivity Services
SQL Reporting Services

SimpleSharePoint's Business Intelligence solutions leverage your existing technology investments in Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL Server, and SharePoint to develop rich integrated reporting and analytic experiences that empower users. In essence, our team will deliver "self-service" approaches and experiences for your users to gain access to accurate, up-to-date information for better, more relevant decision making.

Using SharePoint, people can find the right business information to make better decisions. We work with customers to analyze their current environment, leverage the capabilities of the Microsoft BI platform, determine a vision, and define a plan. With Microsoft Business Intelligence Tools correctly planned and configured, your raw data helps you make critical decisions based on the best information available.

We help our customers to build a plan to gain access to accurate, up-to-date information for better, more relevant decision-making. Empower information analysis in the right format for the right people at the right time.

About Power Pivot / View in SharePoint

Power Pivot and View is a data visualization tool that was developed by the SQL Server Reporting Services team. It's meant to be a user ad hoc reporting and visualization tool which uses in-memory data stores such as Power Pivot and SSAS Tabular Models as its data source. Power View has since been expanded to include support for SSAS Multidimensional Models. Power View is a highly interactive UI built in Silverlight. Power View was embedded in the Excel 2016 and is now available on your desktop. When used with SharePoint 2016 or Office 365, an Excel 2016 workbook with Power View visualizations can be uploaded and viewed interactively in browsers which support Silverlight. Creating, opening, and saving Power View reports (RDLX files) all take place in SharePoint Server 2016/2019.

Power View in SharePoint is a browser-based Silverlight application, a feature of the SQL Server Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Server.

About PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint

By providing flexible, easy-to-use tools for building dashboards, PerformancePoint Services helps individuals across an organization make informed business decisions that align with company-wide objectives and strategy.

PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint Server is a service that you can use to monitor and analyze your business. Dashboards let you analyze the latest information and work with the data quickly and easily to identify key opportunities and trends. PerformancePoint provides

Rich interactive dashboards with scorecards, and key performance indicators (KPIs)
Aggregated content from multiple sources
Displaying in a web browser in an understandable and collaborative environment

A strategy map is a report view that can show relationships between objectives, goals, and key performance indicators (KPIs). In a PerformancePoint dashboard, a strategy map alongside its scorecard might resemble the following images:

Visio Services in SharePoint

One of the coolest little used features of SharePoint. Imagine an interactive process flow map with these features:

Visio diagrams can be rendered by Visio Services and viewed in a Web browser. This also allows diagrams to be viewed on mobile devices without having Visio.
Auto data refresh and recalculate the visuals of a diagram. This enables published diagrams to refresh connections to various data sources and to update affected data graphics and text fields.
If the image below is small - make the screen size narrower and it will respond by growing the image!

Business Intelligence Jump Start - our Service Package.

We offer a SharePoint BI Jump Start to help get Business Intelligence rolling or improved in your enterprise. We start by understanding what your business model is, then work to identify how you define success in your organization, and how we can help leverage your existing data to create actionable Business Intelligence. Once we have all of this, the magic happens.

SharePoint BI Jump Start includes:

Install the core software: SQL server and SharePoint
Install SQL Server BI Features within SharePoint
Install Reporting Services within SharePoint
Install Analysis Services Server in SharePoint
Configure PowerPivot and Deploy Solutions
Create a BI Center and configure BI services and features
Configure Excel Services
Configure PowerPivot
Reporting Services and Power View configuration with SharePoint
Configure PerformancePoint Services.
Configure Visio Services.
Add more features and customize your environment
Train your employees

Why SharePoint BI?

With SharePoint Business Intelligence solutions, you can decisions more informed at every level with a full set of robust tools that can help you access, analyze and share the right information quickly and easily.

Self Service: Help all your people discover and manage the information they need to do their jobs, using a familiar browser interface.
Information from many Sources: Find and work with information from databases, reports, business applications, and other external sources—all within the same environment.
Familiar Tools: Create and share information confidently using familiar, easy-to-navigate tools.

With the SharePoint BI Jump Start program, SimpleSharePoint empowers you to discover the right people and expertise to make better informed and agile business decisions. It will provide you with:

Accountability: Drive, manage, and measure success by using one version of data to align key metrics to specific business strategies.
Transparency: Provide the right people with trusted access to information when they want it.
Discoverability: Make it easier for your people to find the right information across data sources and content types using powerful analytics.

Surfacing Data in SharePoint

SharePoint's destiny is to be the place where information is brought to the forefront (surfaced) and made available to business users that need access in a secure, simple and easy to consume platform. SharePoint is the place to surface data from disparate silos of information. From Line of Business (LOB) systems, File Shares, Legacy systems (including The Big Three – FileNet (IBM), Documentum (EMC) and Open Text) and even from other SharePoint systems.

Many organizations today face the problem of having critical business data locked in siloed legacy systems. Critical business data often is stored in disparate systems. We can resolve this problem by quickly connecting your LOB systems to SharePoint. Workers from across the organization can use a single interface to access appropriate data more quickly and easily, helping to increase the ROI of legacy systems and decrease the need for training. In addition, the native application development capabilities of SharePoint can help your legacy solutions to do more.

A primary interoperability component of SharePoint Server, Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is responsible for reading from and writing to external systems. BCS in SharePoint Server enables connectivity to external data sources, such as databases and LOB systems. With the BCS set of components, external lists can provide full CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) capabilities to data stored in any system that can be connected to SharePoint Server. To users, an external list looks and feels almost exactly like any other SharePoint Server list: They can create new views, easily sort and filter data, and even take data offline using Microsoft Outlook.

Power Pivot (SharePoint 2013-2016) is an SQL Server add-in for Excel 2010 and embedded in Excel 2013, 2016. The focus on Power Pivot is the modeling of the data for use within the visualization tools such as SharePoint Excel services.

With the addition of the diagram view, the ability to model data is even easier. Power Pivot is the in-memory data storage location which can be deployed to SharePoint or SQL Server Analysis Services – Tabular Model. While it is the oldest of the BI offerings, its capabilities are awesome as it brings the ability to mash up data and to model data to the desktop. The data can come from a variety of sources including relational databases, OData feeds, SSRS reports and more.

PowerPivot provides self-service Business Intelligence (BI) functionality for users of Microsoft Office.

Within the PowerPivot for Excel, you can bring data from virtually anywhere
Easily organize, connect, and manipulate tables of large data
Perform an in-depth analysis of your data--any way you want to slice it
Use PowerPivot for SharePoint to share your workbooks across your team or publish them to the Web
Organize tables for the PivotTable tool in a relational way, freeing the analyst from the need to import data as Excel worksheets before analyzing the data.
The availability of a fast, space-saving columnar database that can handle huge amounts of data without the limitations of Excel worksheets.
DAX, a powerful programming language that defines complex expressions on top of the relational database. DAX allows you to define surprisingly rich expressions, compared to those that are standard in Excel.
Amazingly fast in-memory processing of complex queries over the whole database.
The ability to integrate different sources and almost any kind of data, such as information from databases, Excel worksheets, and sources available on the Internet.

Here at SimpleSharePoint, we can help you with publishing your PowerPivot workbooks to SharePoint to great benefits:

You can slice and filter data in a server document in the same way that they do when using a local workbook in Excel.
PowerPivot Gallery - a special-purpose SharePoint document library that provides a rich preview and document management for published PowerPivot workbooks as well as other document types.
Automatic data refresh for workbooks with the latest data at a regularly scheduled interval.
Data feed management: you can create and use data service documents in SharePoint. PowerPivot for SharePoint adds the content type for service documents that point to URLs that provide the feed.
Usage reporting on PowerPivot data access in Central Administration. SharePoint administrators can help you determine who is using your reports and how often.

Power Query

Power Query, aka Data Explorer, brings the capabilities of ETL solutions and expanded data search to your desktop. Its ETL capability is called "data shaping". Once you have connected to a data source (options include: SQL Server, web, Hadoop, and many more), you are able to start shaping the results. The query can be saved and when the data is refreshed the defined steps will be executed against the data again. Not only will Power Query shape your data, it allows you to search for data.

Business Intelligence & SQL Services

Microsoft SQL Server is the core of Sharepoint & Microsoft BI Stack

SQL Server Analysis Services as the OLAP tool (SSAS)
SQL Server Reporting Services as the canned Reporting Tool (SSRS)
SQL Server Integration Services as the ETL tool (SSIS)

Additional tools are SharePoint, Excel, Power Pivot, Power View, Excel Services, Report Designer, and Report Builder.

Our Service Competencies:

Consulting to determine your strategic roadmap
Installation, configuration, and performance tuning
BI services customization

Get the most out of your data. Contact SimpleSharePoint for your custom BI solution today.

SQL Server Tune-Up "Optimization"

Reach your peak performance! Make your SQL Server run more effectively.

You may not even be aware that your database is not at its peak performance due to poor tuning. Database optimization from SimplePortals helps ensure that your SQL server is living up to its full potential. Our Microsoft SQL Server database optimization experts increase your efficiency by tuning your system to ensure optimal performance for your database. The SimplePortal database optimization process ensures optimal SQL Server operation. Our services focus on improving key areas for maximum database functionality.

How We Can Help:

Configure SQL maintenance plans
Tune TempDB sizes and locations
Index optimization: Tune up indexes to reduce processing load on your SQL databases
Databases & Data normalization to increase efficiency

Reporting Tools - Expertly Integrated into SharePoint "Native Mode"

Our reporting services assistance gives your staff information to make better business decisions:

Accelerate time to insight with intuitive and flexible reporting capabilities
Seamlessly glean data from multiple data sources
Allow users to access data from virtually any data source
Take ad hoc reporting to the next level with “grab and go” reporting that lets users combine existing sub-components to create new reports
Integrate seamlessly with Microsoft SharePoint for advanced collaboration and accessibility
Create, manage and deliver reports, and integrate or extend data and report processing in custom applications

Be inspired with better information. Get better insight from multiple data sources today! Contact SimpleSharePoint today.

SQL SRS - Features

SSRS provides a full range of ready-to-use tools and services to help you create, deploy, and manage reports for your organization, as well as programming features that enable you to extend and customize reports. The report authoring tools work with an Office type application and are fully integrated with both SQL Server tools and SharePoint. You can build reports on top of SharePoint lists, publish reports to SharePoint, incorporate reports inside your portal using a reports Web Part, and fully manage your reports published in SharePoint document libraries.

Making the right decision requires more than just access to data. The decisions that make or break you rely on insightful and intuitive reporting. Reporting Services in Microsoft SQL Server are a business intelligence tool used to generate a variety of customized reports from your SQL Server providing you the information that speaks to the issues at hand, in the format that makes the most sense, at the critical moment in which you need it.

SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) Design

What would your business look like if you could drive actionable insights to everyone in your organization? Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services is a multidimensional analysis tool that sets up data mining and supports online analytical processing (OLAP) for sharper business intelligence.

The SSAS Design team from SimplePortals will build a custom, comprehensive, enterprise-class analytic solution for your organization using Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. Deep integration with Microsoft Office and an open, easy to embed architecture will allow you to reach every user using familiar tools. Benefits of enterprise-wide analytics include:

Feature-rich OLAP and data-mining
Completely scalable analytical solutions for company-wide application
Creation of “best practices” for increased productivity
Enhanced insight and global adoption with a familiar, windows-based interface
Customizable analytical outcomes
Consolidation of enterprise analysis data and KPIs

Get your people the analytics tools they need to move your business forward. Contact us today!

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) Development

Data integration from standard data sources like ETL-centric has long been the gold standard of most data warehouses. These days, the rapid proliferation of data sources has made effective data integration from a variety of sources the linchpin of competitive ability. The need to extract value from all data and the ability to rely on it is more critical than ever before.

SQL Server Integration Services provides a flexible, fast, and scalable architecture for building high-performance data integration solutions. The SimplePortals SSIS Development team can help you connect and transform disparate data sources for a scalable enterprise data integration platform with exceptional integration capabilities.

SimplePortals’ experienced Business Intelligence Architects and SSIS specialists can provide exceptional:

SSIS planning
SSIS creation and maintenance
SSIS data transfer and data warehouse loading
Data and text mining for optimal business intelligence

It’s time to put all of your data to work for you. Contact us today to learn how.

Surfacing Data from Other Locations

Set up and configure SharePoint Server and SQL Server BI

About SharePoint Managed Services

Intranets can't standstill. For every day that they remain the same, they fall further behind what organizations need and expect.

At their best, intranets underpin every aspect of workforce activity, whether it's keeping staff informed, or providing them with everyday tools and applications. Modern digital tools can meet today's business challenges, as well as creating new digital opportunities.

Only with sustained attention, however, will your intranet remain relevant, engaging, productive, and valuable. SimpleSharePoint can be your dedicated SharePoint support and advisor. We will evaluate new features, map them to the relevant value for your business, and deliver measurable results.

SharePoint Managed Services

Microsoft Gold Partner SharePoint Consultants