INTRODUCTION

IF YOU'VE PICKED UP THIS BOOK, SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer, you've decided to jump into one of the most dynamic areas of Business Intelligence: the exciting visualizations, collaboration, and data service capabilities built into SharePoint 2010 through its new service application architecture.

This book, then, is your chance to start delving into this powerful and marketable application. And what's more, this is not just a book you're holding right now. It's a video learning tool as well. We became passionate about video training a number of years ago when we realized that in our own learning we required exposure to multiple teaching techniques to truly understand a topic — a fact that is especially true with tutorial books like this one. So, you'll find hours of videos on the DVD in this book to help you learn how to configure, develop, and deploy solutions for solving Business Intelligence problems within SharePoint 2010. These videos are even better than reading about the topic alone and help demonstrate to you the various tutorials in the book.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

This is a beginner book and focuses on covering enough administration to help you through the configuration steps, and leaves the heavy lifting to the other great heavy-duty administration books on the market like Professional SharePoint 2010 Administration. It focuses on introducing the large number of accidental SharePoint developers and administrators to the most common and exciting portions of SharePoint Business Intelligence. It also pulls out best practices and lessons from the field to help you make the most of your learning, prototyping, and project planning.

HOW THIS BOOK IS STRUCTURED

Our main principle in this book is to teach you only what we think you need to perform your job task. Because of that, it's not a comprehensive reference book but should blend the best of the basics with some great from the field style tips and tricks with real work best practices and proven techniques to help you deliver value quickly. The book blends small amounts of description, a tutorial, and videos to enhance your experience. Each lesson walks you through how to use a particular area of the new SharePoint platform and contains a tutorial. In this tutorial, called “Try It,” you can choose to read the requirements to complete the lesson, the hints of how to go about it, and begin building, or you can read the step-by-step instructions if you learn better that way. Either way if you get stuck or want to see how one of us does the solution, watch the video on the DVD to receive further instruction.

WHAT THIS BOOK COVERS

This book covers SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence and the setup, configuration, and planning that should go into a project focused on these topics. It covers Excel Services, PerformancePoint Services, Visio Services, and Business Connectivity Services, as well as Reporting Services development and integration into SharePoint.

By the end of this book, you will be able to take the hard work you've put in on the data model and ETL and turn it into dramatic visualizations and support tremendous ad hoc analysis for your power users. This is the type of deliverable that gets projects approved in our experience.

This book contains 31 lessons, which are broken into 7 sections. The lessons are usually only a few pages long and focus on the smallest unit of work in SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence that we could work on. Each section has a large theme around a given section in SharePoint Business Intelligence:

• Section I: Getting Started with SharePoint 2010 — This section covers what's new in SharePoint 2010, how to use the administration tools, and how basic security works.
• Section II: Configuring SharePoint for Business Intelligence — This section walks the reader through configuring the major service applications required for the cool projects you'll be building soon.
• Section III: Applying SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence in Office — This section introduces how to begin developing SharePoint analysis solutions right from within Office 2010.
• Section IV: Creating Advanced Analytics in SharePoint — This section covers more advanced things like data refresh and extending the analysis to include PerformancePoint analytics.
• Section V: Branding and Managing Organizational Business Intelligence — This section introduces you to theming and customizing your SharePoint sites to match the look of your internal applications and environment.
• Section VI: Scaling SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence — This section introduces you to scaling out these applications as your new solutions take off and grow.
• Section VII: Implementing SharePoint Business Intelligence in Your Organization — This section helps you work through the process and mechanics of getting a project going on this new technology to show off your new skills.

INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEOS ON DVD

As mentioned earlier in this Introduction, because we believe strongly in the value of video training, this book has an accompanying DVD containing hours of instructional video. At the end of each lesson in the book, you will find a reference to an instructional video on the DVD that accompanies that lesson. In that video, one of us will walk you through the content and examples contained in that lesson. So, if seeing something done and hearing it explained helps you understand a subject better than just reading about it does, this book and DVD combination is just the thing for you to get started with this technology.

CONVENTIONS

To help you get the most from the text and keep track of what's happening, we've used a number of conventions throughout the book.

As for styles in the text:

• We highlight new terms and important words when we introduce them.
• We show URLs and code within the text like so: persistence.properties.
• We present code in the following way:

  We use a monofont type for code examples.
  

SUPPORTING EXAMPLES AND CODE

As you work through the lessons in this book, you may choose either to type in all the code and create all the examples manually or to use the supporting files that accompany the book. All the support files used in this book are available for download at www.wrox.com. Once at the site, simply locate the book's title (either by using the Search box or by using one of the title lists) and click the Download Code link on the book's detail page to obtain all the source code for the book.

Once you download the code, just decompress it with your favorite compression tool. Alternatively, you can go to the main Wrox code download page at www.wrox.com/dynamic/books/download.aspx to see the code available for this book and all other Wrox books.

ERRATA

We make every effort to ensure that there are no errors in the text or in the code. However, no one is perfect, and mistakes do occur. If you find an error in one of our books, like a spelling mistake or faulty piece of code, we would be very grateful for your feedback. By sending in errata you may save another reader hours of frustration and at the same time you will be helping us provide even higher quality information.

To find the errata page for this book, go to www.wrox.com and locate the title using the Search box or one of the title lists. Then, on the Book Search Results page, click the Errata link. On this page, you can view all errata that has been submitted for this book and posted by Wrox editors.

If you don't spot “your” error on the Errata page, click the Errata Form link and complete the form to send us the error you have found. We'll check the information and, if appropriate, post a message to the book's errata page and fix the problem in subsequent editions of the book.

P2P.WROX.COM

For author and peer discussion, join the P2P forums at p2p.wrox.com. The forums are a web-based system for you to post messages relating to Wrox books and related technologies and interact with other readers and technology users. The forums offer a subscription feature to e-mail you topics of interest of your choosing when new posts are made to the forums. Wrox authors, editors, other industry experts, and your fellow readers are present on these forums.

At p2p.wrox.com you will find a number of different forums that will help you not only as you read this book, but also as you develop your own applications. To join the forums, just follow these steps:

1. Go to p2p.wrox.com and click the Register link.
2. Read the terms of use and click Agree.
3. Complete the required information to join as well as any optional information you wish to provide and click Submit.
4. You will receive an e-mail with information describing how to verify your account and complete the joining process.

Once you join, you can post new messages and respond to messages other users post. You can read messages at any time on the Web. If you would like to have new messages from a particular forum e-mailed to you, click the Subscribe to this Forum icon by the forum name in the forum listing.

For more information about how to use the Wrox P2P, be sure to read the P2P FAQs for answers to questions about how the forum software works as well as many common questions specific to P2P and Wrox books. To read the FAQs, click the FAQ link on any P2P page.