MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED Planning a SharePoint 2010 Implementation of a Business Intelligence Strategy 11-5 • Explain the data management and access issues that are relevant to BI design. • Plan how to implement BI in SharePoint 2010. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 11-6 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure Goals of Business Intelligence Key Points There are a range of definitions of BI, so it is probably more useful to assess the goals of BI instead. In this way, you can more fully understand what you should achieve through your solution design. There are three key goals: • Self-service and personal business intelligence. • Business intelligence for the community. • Organizational business intelligence. Self-Service and Personal BI The goal of self-service and personal BI is to ensure that users can provide their own BI services. Usually, it involves personal productivity facilities such as Microsoft Office, in addition to access to back-end data sources such as SQL Server or other database software. Users, usually information workers, can format and MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED Planning a SharePoint 2010 Implementation of a Business Intelligence Strategy 11-7 analyze data to generate business logic models that help them make decisions. This involves little or no ongoing effort from the IT department. Business Intelligence for the Community The goal of BI for the community is the ability to analyze data in a collaborative environment. The aim is to create teams who can combine effort and therefore produce more complex or better informed business models. This requires a more sophisticated approach to business systems, but has the major benefit of eradicating silos of business information that are outside the control of the business. Eradicating such silos is the most common goal of BI implementations. Therefore, a solution architect must identify opportunities for teams to share common information to make corporate decisions. A good example of how this extends personal BI is exhibited by the difference between Microsoft Excel® 2010 and Excel Services. Excel 2010 provides personal productivity, whereas Excel Services provides a truly collaborative environment. This approach creates a homogeneous data environment where both local information, such as Excel workbooks, and corporate data are used in a coherent manner across an organization. This usually involves greater input from IT services through the provision of collaborative tools, but the power of how to use information remains with information worker teams. Organizational Business Intelligence Organizational BI extends the use of business data beyond individual or team usage and creates a strategic model for business operation. The company goals are reflected in the use of data, with BI tools generating preanalyzed output that aligns with organizational goals. As a superset of the model of BI for the community, information workers can continue to collaborate on data analysis, but work is placed in the context of the overarching business strategy. This model commonly uses key performance indicators (KPIs), dashboards, and scorecards to publish achievements or targets. This model has the added benefit of enforcing governance across the business at a day-to-day level. This approach often requires a lot of architectural and developmental effort from the IT department, based on business requirements from BI stakeholders and the organization’s management team. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 11-8 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure Identifying Business Intelligence Opportunities Key Points As a solution architect, it is essential that you can reconcile business requirements with opportunities for the use of BI. This does not mean that you must use BI. Rather, you must recognize when BI, and specifically the SharePoint 2010 BI toolset, is appropriate to your design. Here are some examples of requirements that should trigger a review of SharePoint 2010 BI components: • Deliver user autonomy. If business stakeholders and users identify self-service as a key requirement, you should investigate their goals and reasons for this. The goal should be to enable users to more quickly generate business solutions through closer collaboration and accessibility to back-end corporate data. You should avoid the need to involve the IT department in protracted systems design projects. One of the key benefits of BI is that it enables information workers to have structured and managed access to corporate information when they need it. Be careful of the goal of unilateral independence from the IT department; sometimes users feel that the IT department is a blocker to BI, rather than an enabler. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED Planning a SharePoint 2010 Implementation of a Business Intelligence Strategy 11-9 • Share Excel workbooks through browsers. The ability to work collaboratively on Excel workbooks has previously involved saving a workbook on a shared drive so that others can access it. This is still possible with SharePoint 2010, and has the obvious advantages of version control and check-in and check-out from document libraries. SharePoint 2010 Excel Services enables users to view and interact with Excel 2010 workbooks through a browser, which is the key benefit. This browser functionality, together with Web Part visualization, means that users can now work collaboratively wherever they are and without the need to have the client license for Excel 2010. • Deploy dashboards. Business dashboards enable you to deploy BI information to both BI and non-BI users through an onscreen Web Part. You should review requirements to identify where stakeholders need information delivered directly to users, too, rather than just for their own analysis. • Deploy status indicators and KPIs. Status indicators and KPIs give the information worker a current view of performance. This is only deliverable with a connected system because you must have access to back-end data sources to ensure that the status reflects current business achievements. • Generate business scorecards. Business scorecards provide overall view of status indicators. They are modeled after the business, not the data, to reflect goals. These may be included as part of a dashboard. • Enable business process visualization. For environments such as process industries that map complex processes in Microsoft Visio® 2010, you should investigate whether these are required just for Visio users or for a wider audience. This is especially the case when Visio diagrams are connected to back-end data systems that monitor or manage business processes. • Create a central reporting location. Identify whether users want a centralized reporting environment. Deploying single instances of reports minimizes the effort that is wasted in user generation of multiple versions of the same information. • Provide central management for external data connections. Assess the need for central management of connections to back-end business data sources. If your environment has a range of complex data access requirements, you should review the opportunities to create a managed set of data connections that are made available to users. This minimizes duplication of effort and makes solution deployment faster. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 11-10 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure Data Security Management in Corporate Business Intelligence Key Points When you are designing a BI deployment strategy for SharePoint 2010, you must ensure that you look at how your organization manages data, in addition to matching BI tools to requirements. Most companies have an overarching BI strategy, which includes elements such as data compliance and security. For your design to succeed, you must fit the SharePoint 2010 solutions into this strategy. Organizational Compliance The security component requires that you understand the company-wide standards for security, such as: • Protocols. Which security protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, and so on) are used in your organization and does SharePoint 2010 support them? MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED Planning a SharePoint 2010 Implementation of a Business Intelligence Strategy 11-11 • Authentication. Does your organization want to implement a single sign-on (SSO) approach, with authentication transferred through a given methodology between different platforms? • Management. How does your environment manage personal credentials? Security Integration From a systems management perspective, it is important to aggregate the security mechanisms of various platforms. Each is likely to have its own implementation of data security, so you must understand which platforms and methodologies can integrate with SharePoint 2010. You can deliver a range of security and authentication implementations in SharePoint 2010, such as classic or claims. You must plan to implement the correct security implementation for your Web applications. Seamless User Experience Your users employ various systems, so they almost certainly want to minimize the need for multiple logon credentials. This is critical for a BI implementation because the goal is to provide a seamless flow of information and authentication. SharePoint 2010 delivers claims-based security and the Secure Store Service, which enables you to provide security accreditation across systems without intervention from users in the form of additional logons. Central Control In your BI plan, you must also establish the responsibilities of IT and deployed administration control of security. SharePoint security is, by default, centralized, which offers coordinated security management. You can also delegate security administration to departmental groups to minimize IT intervention and maximize effective response to users. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 11-12 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure Planning the Implementation of BI in SharePoint Key Points SharePoint 2010 improved BI options over those that were previously available in Office SharePoint Server 2007. New options include PerformancePoint Services, and enhancements to existing options include Excel Services. In addition, some BI solutions are available that are not directly SharePoint 2010 solutions, such as Excel 2010, which remains the most popular BI user tool. When you create a design, you must map BI solutions to your business requirements. These should relate to the three principal goals: • Self-service and personal business intelligence. • Business intelligence for the community. • Organizational business intelligence. Self-Service and Personal Business Intelligence In the area of personal business productivity, use the essentially personal tools such as Excel 2010 (optionally with PowerPivot) and Visio 2010. These can draw MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED Planning a SharePoint 2010 Implementation of a Business Intelligence Strategy 11-13 information from external systems, but do not necessarily provide collaborative environments. It is possible to share output from these and, in the case of Excel 2010, provide input to BI components such as Status Indicator Web Parts, but only one worker at a time can use them. For these types of files, you may need to deploy centralized metadata tagging in SharePoint 2010 through custom content types and columns. These can implement business standards through workflows and the document information panel. You may also implement report standardization by provisioning Report Builder. Business Intelligence for the Community In the collaborative sector, use the SharePoint BI tools such as Excel Services and the Visio Graphics Service. These are collaborative tools that provide information to the wider user population through a browser-based user interface (UI). If you need to make workbooks available for multiuser updates, a possible solution is using Excel Services rather than Excel 2010. Using the Visio Graphics Service, you can make the function and business logic in Visio drawings available to all users of the SharePoint 2010 environment. PerformancePoint Services straddles the divide between community and organizational productivity. You may deploy PerformancePoint Services for a group or individuals to use to create BI solutions, such as dashboards or workflows, which are useful for personal or team productivity. SQL Server Reporting Services is a SQL Server function, but you can deploy it through SharePoint 2010. Lesson 4, Planning for Reporting and Presentation, discusses this more fully. Organizational Business Intelligence PerformancePoint Services is an essential tool for organizational BI. It enables you to design and deploy centralized BI solutions, such as dashboards and KPIs, across the user environment. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 11-14 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure Lesson 2 Planning Data Access by Using BCS Although BCS is not usually included in the core BI tools in SharePoint 2010, it is an integral component for integrating LOB data with SharePoint applications. If back-end data integration is a key business requirement for your users, it is almost certain that you will need to implement BCS. You should review such integration in the widest terms, because BCS is also used in search and social computing solutions. For a SharePoint 2010 BI environment, it is essential to plan your data access strategy because issues over failed access or overly complex authentication configuration have often impacted BI implementations. SharePoint 2010 provides BCS, which provides data access to users and SharePoint applications beyond the traditional BI solutions of Excel Services. Objectives After completing this lesson, you will be able to: • Describe the key components and functions of BCS. . PROHIBITED 11-14 Designing a Microsoft SharePoint 20 10 Infrastructure Lesson 2 Planning Data Access by Using BCS Although BCS is not usually included in the core BI tools in SharePoint 20 10, it is an. PROHIBITED 11- 12 Designing a Microsoft SharePoint 20 10 Infrastructure Planning the Implementation of BI in SharePoint Key Points SharePoint 20 10 improved BI options over those that were previously available. with SharePoint 20 10, and has the obvious advantages of version control and check-in and check-out from document libraries. SharePoint 20 10 Excel Services enables users to view and interact