Introducing Business Intelligence (BI)

Proposing an integrated solution

• Identifying problems with current business practices as they relate to Business Intelligence
• Aligning business objectives at all levels of the enterprise
• Introducing the Microsoft BI vision and strategy

Identifying components of the Microsoft BI platform

• SQL Server
• Integration Services
• Analysis Services
• Reporting Services
• Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
• Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server

Collecting BI Data with Integration Services

Integrating data from multiple sources

• Connecting to external data sources
• Creating a package for data imports

Working with Integration Services in a data warehouse

• Populating a star and snowflake schema in SQL Server with Integration Services
• Automating package execution from the command line

Leveraging SQL Server Relational Engine

• Denormalising into star or snowflake schemas
• Introducing surrogate keys
• Dealing with slowly changing dimensions

Leveraging SQL Server Analysis Services

Defining and building a cube

• Facts
• Dimensions
• Hierarchies
• Measures
• Extracting data from cubes with MDX
• Creating a cube with Analysis Services wizards
• Denormalising the database
• Creating Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Extracting insight with data mining

• Determining data mining algorithms for specific business data problems
• Utilising data mining to perform targeted marketing

Presenting Data with Reporting Services

Authoring a basic report

• Building Tabular and Matrix reports with the Report Wizard
• Creating a report based on an Analysis Services cube

Taking advantage of interactivity

• Implementing drill down/up and expand/collapse
• Exporting to other formats such as Excel

Exploiting Excel for Predictive Analysis

Creating models for data mining

• Preparing and cleaning input data
• Partitioning data into training and testing sets
• Applying available models to solve business problems
• Analysing key influencers of desired outcomes
• Discovering natural clusters of large volumes of data

Pivoting table data

• Creating charts and pivot tables from different data sources
• Connecting to Analysis Services with Excel
• Drilling down to multiple levels of detail
• Producing custom solutions with the CUBExxx functions and MDX

Publishing reports and models

• Saving a workbook to a SharePoint document library
• Viewing an Excel workbook from a Web browser

Delivering BI through SharePoint

Identifying the components of SharePoint

• Comparing WSS and MOSS
• Benefits of the BI tools available in MOSS

Preparing to display BI data in SharePoint

• Creating a Report Builder report
• Deploying data sources to a data source library
• Uploading reports to a report library

Displaying dashboards

• Building a SharePoint dashboard
• Embedding KPIs and reports
• Loading BI Web Parts

Smarter Decisions with PerformancePoint

Monitoring enterprise health

• Creating dashboards for displaying company data
• Building scorecards to provide an overall rating of the organisation
• Including specific KPIs to identify target areas

Analysing organisational performance

• Presenting Analysis Services queries in chart view
• Visualising analytic charts, grids and strategy maps