Microsoft has several business intelligence (BI) tools and applications that have BI features, each of which is important to understand as you decide what will work best for your situation. The BI tools that you should use depend on the specific problems that you are trying to solve.
Your daily business activities have associated information and insights that emerge in three main areas of business intelligence: personal, team, and organizational. There will be overlap across these areas. For example, a company's employees may use Microsoft Excel 2010 and Excel Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to make relevant business decisions at the corporate level. PerformancePoint Services uses Excel, Visio Services, and Excel Services to complement its BI tools to deliver a corporate dashboard that may reflect elements of personal and team BI. By design, all Microsoft BI products interoperate so that teams and people inside an organization can move across the continuum of personal, team, and organizational and have all products work together.
The SDPS Guidance includes planning resources for:
- Excel Calculation Services
- Performance Point
- Visio Graphics Services
- PowerPivot for SharePoint
- SQL Reporting Services with SharePoint Integration