Chapter 1. Introduction to the Business Intelligence Center in SharePoint 2010

The Business Intelligence Center is a prebuilt site collection and site template that you can use to get started with your integration of business intelligence (BI) solutions and SharePoint 2010. Although you can build solutions into other sites or site collections, the Business Intelligence Center provides a foundation of features and SharePoint components that enables you to quickly create a central location for the presentation of BI information.

Planning for Your Business Intelligence Center

This section provides some preliminary thoughts and actions for organizations interested in implementing BI functionality to provide end users a vehicle for gaining insight into business performance. Planning aspects are covered in this section, although from a fairly high level because of the wealth of information provided by Microsoft on these topics (for which links are given). To start, it is recommended that you review the business intelligence planning section from Microsoft TechNet, located at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee683867.aspx.

Server Prerequisites and Licensing Considerations

SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise is required to use the BI services provided by SharePoint. From the SQL Server side, SQL Server 2005 and 2008 are supported options for Excel Services, PerformancePoint Services, and Visio Services. However, SQL Server 2008 R2 64-bit is required for Reporting Services and PowerPivot when integrating with SharePoint 2010. Therefore, it is recommended that you use SQL Server 2008 R2 64-bit within your SharePoint farm architecture.

Choosing BI Tools

SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server bring together various services and tools that enable you to build out business intelligence solutions. The various services and tools covered in this book are as follows:

• Excel Services

• Reporting Services

• PerformancePoint Services

• PowerPivot

• Visio Services

You can use all of these tools either separately or together to provide an organization with its desired business performance solution. Each tool has its own purpose and role within a BI solution. Therefore, it is important to understand each one and determine how it might fit within an organization. (See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff394320.aspx for more help in this area.)

Another way to understand how you might use these tools independently or together is by reviewing already constructed solutions, case studies, and business scenarios. Microsoft has compiled a helpful list of these, shown in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1. Solutions and Scenarios Provided by Microsoft

Creating and Configuring Your Business Intelligence Center

The Business Intelligence Center is available as a site collection template and as a site template. By default, the Business Intelligence Center site template is not available from the SharePoint 2010 front end when creating a new site, and therefore you must create your Business Intelligence Center as a site collection from SharePoint Central Administration. After the Business Intelligence Center site collection has been created, the Business Intelligence Center site template is available to create subsites that integrate with the site collection. Once created, the new site collection (or site) contains various SharePoint components and has features deployed and activated. This section steps through the creation process and review of the Business Intelligence Center components.

Creating a New Site Collection Using the Business Intelligence Center Site Collection Template

The following steps walk through the process of creating a new site collection using the Business Intelligence Center template. Complete the following steps to create your Business Intelligence Center:

1. From within SharePoint 2010 Central Administration, click the Create Site Collections link in the Application Management section.
2. Select the web application you want to create the site collection.
3. Provide a name for the site collection (for example, Business Intelligence Center).
4. Select a managed path or use the link provided to generate a new managed path. For this example, the /sites/ managed path is used.
5. Enter the URL for the new site collection (for example, BICenter).
6. Select the Business Intelligence Center template from the Enterprise tab, as shown in Figure 1.1.

   Figure 1.1. Selecting the Business Intelligence Center site collection template.

   

7. Enter a primary administrator for the site collection.
8. Optionally, enter a secondary administrator for the site collection.
9. Optionally, select a quota template.
10. Click OK.

SharePoint creates the new site collection using the managed path and URL entered. Upon successful completion of the process, a successful creation screen is presented along with a link to the new site collection, as shown in Figure 1.2. Click the link to open the new Business Intelligence Center.

Figure 1.2. Successful creation of the Business Intelligence Center site collection.

Reviewing the Business Intelligence Center

When you navigate to the new Business Intelligence Center site collection, you see that the main page of the top-level site contains four quick launch links, as shown in Figure 1.3:

• Dashboards

• Data Connections

• Libraries

• PerformancePoint Content

Figure 1.3. Main page of the Business Intelligence Center.

The Dashboards link takes you to the Dashboards library, which is essentially a page library that allows you to store web part pages and dashboard pages. Data Connections is a link to the Data Connections library, where all the data connections for your BI solution should be stored. The Libraries link displays all the SharePoint libraries within the Business Intelligence Center site collection, as shown in Figure 1.4. Finally, the PerformancePoint Content link displays the PerformancePoint Content list, which stores PerformancePoint objects deployed to the Business Intelligence Center via Dashboard Designer. (See Chapter 7, “PerformancePoint Services Development,” for more information on using Dashboard Designer.)

Figure 1.4. Libraries available within the Business Intelligence Center site collection.

Reviewing Features Enabled for BI

Assuming the previous steps were followed and the Business Intelligence Center site collection created, you need to review the site collection features to make sure the appropriate items are enabled.

Follow these steps to verify the features are enabled at the site collection level:

1. Navigate to the site settings page for Business Intelligence Center site collection from the Site Actions menu.
2. Click Site Collection Features in the Site Collection Administration section.
3. Locate the PerformancePoint Services Site Collection Features entry, as shown in Figure 1.5.

   Figure 1.5. PerformancePoint Services site collection features.

   

4. If the feature is not activated, click Activate.

Follow these steps to verify the features are enabled at the site level:

1. Navigate to the site settings page for Business Intelligence Center site collection.
2. Click Manage site features in the Site Actions section.
3. Locate the PerformancePoint Services Site Features entry, as shown in Figure 1.6.

   Figure 1.6. PerformancePoint Services site features.

   

4. If the feature is not activated, click Activate.

Creating a New Subsite Using the Business Intelligence Center Site Template

The Business Intelligence Center site template is available as a site-creation option within the main Business Intelligence Center site collection. You can use this site template to generate subsites within the Business Intelligence Center. Although by activating features on other site collections the Business Intelligence Center site template may be available, it becomes useless unless the site is generated within the Business Intelligence Center site collection.

To create a Business Intelligence Center subsite, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the main Business Intelligence Center site collection in which you want to create a subsite.
2. From the Site Actions menu, select New Site. The Create dialog appears.
3. Select Data in the Categories section on the left side of the dialog.
4. Select the Business Intelligence Center site template, as shown in Figure 1.7.

   Figure 1.7. Creating a subsite using the Business Intelligence site template.

   

5. Enter a name and URL name for the site. (Optionally, click More Options to enter initial settings.)
6. Click Create.

SharePoint creates the new site under the current Business Intelligence Center site collection using the URL entered and integrates the subsite into the Business Intelligence Center. The subsite appears in the top navigation and within the quick launch of the top-level (parent) site, as shown in Figure 1.8.

Figure 1.8. Business Intelligence Center with a subsite.

Summary

This chapter covered prerequisites for implementing BI with SharePoint 2010 and topics to consider when planning BI solutions within an organization. As discussed throughout this chapter, the creation and configuration of the Business Intelligence Center is the first step in getting started; it provides a central location for presenting performance and company data using the tools discussed throughout this book.

Best Practices

The following are best practices from this chapter:

• Review the BI planning section from Microsoft TechNet, located at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee683867.aspx.

• Use SQL Server 2008 R2 64-bit within your SharePoint farm architecture to take advantage of all BI tools on the 2010 platform without limitations.

• You can use all the tools covered in this book separately or together to provide an organization with its desired business performance solution. It is recommended that you become familiar with each of these components and understand how they might fit into various solutions. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff394320.aspx for more information.

• A great way to understand how you can use the Microsoft BI tools independently or together is by reviewing already constructed solutions, case studies, and business scenarios. Microsoft has compiled a helpful list of these, available at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ee692578.aspx.

• Use the Business Intelligence Center site template within a Business Intelligence Center site collection only when creating BI subsites. Although by activating features on other site collections the Business Intelligence Center site template may be available, it becomes useless unless the site is generated within a Business Intelligence Center site collection. This method does not generate the appropriate libraries and lists within the site. Although you can create most of these manually, there is no place to store PerformancePoint content.