Tag Archives: sharepoint business intelligence

Adding Dashboards to a Dashboard Library in SharePoint Online

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Before we get down to the specifics of building a dashboard library inside our SharePoint Online, Enterprise E3 Business Intelligence Center (BIC) site collection, we need to note an important point. PerformancePoint Services Dashboard Designer is NOT available to SharePoint Online users. So plan on building any of the dashboards you require locally, with, for example, Excel 2013.

Once you’ve collected a set of dashboards you’ll want to add them to a library in your BIC site collection. In SharePoint Online, Office 365, 2013, any custom lists or libraries will need to be built as “Apps”. You will add your dashboard library in the BIC site collection by clicking on the “site contents” link at the bottom of the left hand Quick Launch panel. As to the type of library App you will require for your dashboards? The best answer can be found in reference materials provided by Microsoft.

To take a step back, we think businesses should first globally plan content and matching library and list types for SharePoint Online prior to actually migrating users to the platform. Microsoft provides a reference article Plan content on sites. This article is step 3 of a set of articles designed to provide businesses with the planning information required for a smooth migration to the SharePoint Online computing platform. So reading this article first is recommended.

A second article, Introduction to libraries categorizes a dashboards library as one “Contain[ing] Web Part pages, Web Part Pages with Status Lists, and PerformancePoint deployed dashboards”.

We opted to simply add a library app titled “Our Dashboards” to store our locally created dashboards to our BIC site collection and set the default template to “Web Part Page”.

If you plan on exposing dashboards to your business users via SharePoint Online and need assistance planning a successful implementation, please contact us. A subject matter expert from our colleagues may be able to provide you with some useful information, while saving you time and otherwise unnecessary expense.

Ira Michael Blonder

© Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved

Adding a Business Intelligence Site Collection to SharePoint Online, Office 365 2013

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We planned to add a status list to the top level site collection of our Office 365, SharePoint Online account. But we quickly learned about the removal of this out of the box type of list from an article, Discontinued features and modified functionality in Microsoft SharePoint 2013, which was published on the Microsoft® Office web site.

The reason for the removal of this feature? “Similar features can be used with other applications, such as Excel Services”. The workaround is as follows:

  1. “If you used SharePoint Status Indicators in SharePoint Server 2010, you can continue to use them in SharePoint Server 2013.”
  2. or, ” If you did not use SharePoint Status Indicators and Status Lists in SharePoint Server 2010 you can use other SharePoint functionality such as Excel Services to create key performance indicators (KPIs).”

(all quotes have been extracted from the Office article. We’ve provided a link to the entire article above)

Before you attempt to follow 2), keep in mind the following:

  • You must have an Office 365 Enterprise Service Plan in order to activate Excel Services
  • SharePoint Online is a multi tenancy computing environment. As a tenant, you cannot access central administration
  • You will need to make sure “SharePoint Server Enterprise Features”, including “Features such as Visio Services, Access Services, and Excel Services Application, included in the SharePoint Server Enterprise License”, is enabled (quotes are extracted from the SharePoint Online, 2013 user interface) for each and every site collection for which you decide to implement Excel Services to produce the color coded status feature
  • This administrative control at the site collection level can be extended to the site level within each of your site collections. You can choose, at any time, to activate the “SharePoint Server Enterprise Features” at the site level

You must first have a site collection before you can access the site collection features we’ve just noted. We chose to set up a Business Intelligence Center (BIC) site collection for the list. SharePoint Online includes an Enterprise Site Template for a BIC Site Collection. In the next post to this blog we’ll discuss the BIC site collection in further detail.

Ira Michael Blonder

© Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved

Enterprise IT Organizations Using Microsoft’s BI Platform should Equip LOB Users with Training Content through SharePoint

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Our video training content set, Reporting Services Using SharePoint 2010 and Report Builder 3.0 is available either for single user viewing, or unlimited enterprise-wide viewing. At a one time cost of $1995.00, we think that enterprises with a complex commitment to the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform (which includes SQL Server 2008 R2, or SQL Server 2012) should seriously consider purchasing our content with the unlimited, enterprise-wide viewing privileges.

Examples of enterprise businesses that meet this qualification of having a substantial — and complex — need for BI information, along with a commitment, enterprise wide, to Microsoft’s BI paradigm (along with a commitment to utilize SharePoint 2010 as an Internet, Intranet or Extranet computing platform), include any enterprise where line of business (LOB) units have been constructed to manage different categories of products, ostensibly for different markets. It is likely that various LOBs will have needs for BI information; for example, balanced scorecards, dashboards and/or tracking procedures for progress against key performance indicators (KPIs).

In essence, all of these BI procedures will make use of the same set of tools and procedures. Therefore, our set of training content can deliver valuable information across the whole range of users within this type of enterprise business. Further, by exposing technical training content like our set on Reporting Services for SharePoint 2010 (which provides instruction on how to use “no-code” workflows, with SharePoint Designer 2010, to architect and even build automated procedures) to power users and/or what Gartner, Inc refers to as “Citizen Developers” there is a better chance that the automated processes that will be built will better service LOB requirements. In fact, there are few users within an enterprise business better equipped than these power users and/or Citizen Developers to plan, implement and then operate automated procedures for BI purposes. Therefore, it will likely make sense for enterprise IT organizations to endorse implementation of this type of training content.

It is also worth noting that the cost of $1995.00, when spread over a large organization with more than 100 users who can benefit from unlimited access to this training content, represents a very low cost method (a mere $19.95 per user) of training teams to successfully use these tools. We are hard pressed to point to a lower cost method of providing users with training content on this topic. Enterprise organizations will likely recoup the cost of acquiring our content in one month or less. Therefore, it makes sense for enterprises with many needs for SQL Reporting Services 2008 R2, within a SharePoint computing environment, to consider purchasing our content.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2012 All Rights Reserved
on behalf of Rehmani Consulting, Inc.

Building Dashboards for Business Intelligence with Excel Services for SharePoint 2007 and 2010 Enterprise Edition

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Rehmani Consulting offers a detailed video training course that depicts the procedures required to create dashboards from data stored in Excel spreadsheets. This course presents a set of procedures that can be implemented by line of business (LOB) groups within an organization to promote collaboration on business intelligence projects. As such, the techniques demonstrated should be on the short list of any organization looking to increase the utility of SharePoint 2007 or 2010 for business performance monitoring purposes. Please note: either SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition is required in order to implement the procedures demonstrated in our video training course; as well, the Excel version must be 2007 or later in order to build the dashboards that we depict in this video. Finally, Administration must enable Excel Services in SharePoint for the procedures to work.

The intended audience for this video training course includes SharePoint Administrators, Site Collection Administrators, Developers, and Architects. As well, LOB power users can benefit from the procedures where appropriate permissions have been granted.

The procedures demonstrated make use of:

  • the conditional formatting features for Excel 2007 and later versions,
  • publishing data from Excel spreadsheets to SharePoint Excel Services,
  • and the set of nine filters that ship with SharePoint 2010 along with the filter actions web part.

The method we demonstrate is useful, to a large extent, as a result of the ubiquitous nature of Excel spread sheet usage. Lots and lots of data presently reside in Excel spreadsheets, therefore, building displays of historical LOB performance based on this readily available data makes sense as a high value deliverable from Excel and SharePoint 2007 or 2010 Enterprise Edition.

The procedures constitute a method of publishing business intelligence data in a graphical format, online, via a web page display that can be highly useful for organizations using SharePoint for an Intranet, or Extranet implementation. No special programming capabilities are required to exploit these features; therefore, applying SharePoint Enterprise Edition to data residing in Microsoft Excel for the purpose of informing members of an organization, or its partners, of historical business performance statistics may be a valuable activity. Simply considering the costs of custom programming that would be required to replicate the power of the dashboards that we demonstrate without SharePoint Enterprise Edition should be an adequate incentive for any organization to explore these procedures.

If your organization would like to avail of the type of online display of business intelligence that our procedures demonstrate, then you should seriously consider a subscription to video training content like our course as a means of empowering capable personnel with the techniques they require to get the job done.

Please contact us to discuss your specific requirements. You can either telephone us at +1 630-786-7026 or contact us via email, we will be happy to learn more about your specific objectives, relative to SharePoint, for your organization.

As ever, use this link to place an order for an annual subscription to SharePoint-Videos instructional content

© Rehmani Consulting Inc, all rights reserved

Utilizing SharePoint 2010 Lists and Libraries to Automatically store eMail Files and Messages Promises Substantial Benefits

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Rehmani Consulting, Inc. offers an important video training course on Email enabling [SharePoint] Lists and Libraries Access to this video is restricted to our web site subscribers and customers who have purchased our SharePoint 2007 Site Admin and End User Training DVD.

We need to note that the techniques presented in this video cannot be performed in an Office 365 SharePoint environment. Further, the techniques are demonstrated to work in a SharePoint 2007 environment. As of the time of this post we are determining whether, or not, the same procedures apply to SharePoint 2010. Finally, these settings apply to incoming email messages — not outbound email messages.

What is important about the procedures demonstrated in this video is that, by setting up the process presented, the end user task of adopting a new procedure, which will make the unstructured data represented by text email messages, as well as the files appended to email messages that much more accessible by adding them into either SharePoint Lists or Libraries. a much easier and, in fact, largely transparent objective for the user.

The fact is that the type of substantial changes to ingrained, day to day work procedures that are required to realize the promise of SharePoint as an enterprise platform that can truly support panoramic exposure of structured and unstructured data, are almost insurmountable for end users. These tasks have to be automated as the vast majority of end users will not adopt radically different daily procedures.

As our tutorial demonstrates, this procedure, which is configured via the Central Administration settings, will automatically execute based upon settings which a SharePoint 2007 Farm administrator can certainly set. Further, we demonstrate how to configure specific lists and/or libraries for receipt of targeted incoming email. Therefore, the procedures constitute a total solution that elevates the entire process of exposing unstructured text email messages to business intelligence (BI) tools for SharePoint 2007 above the daily attention of end users. Therefore, we think the reliability and accuracy of this process will be very high.

It is very valuable for SharePoint personnel tasked with developing an information architecture that will extract the highest possible value from an enterprise’s investment in this software to identify video training classes like this one on email enabling SharePoint Lists and Libraries for their value as methods of overcoming barriers to end user adoption of the platform. If SharePoint is an important and strategic solution for your enterprise, you ought to look into whether or not it make sense to allocate resources to explore methods of automating important procedures typical of end user adoption of SharePoint. Certainly we can help you accomplish your objective. Please contact us. We will be happy to elaborate on the above with some concrete suggestions that will benefit your business. You can either telephone us at +1 630-786-7026 or contact us via email with any questions you may have about our video training set for SharePoint in the Cloud, or any topic related to either training content for SharePoint or training methods for individuals and/or enterprises.

As ever, use this link to place an order for an annual subscription to SharePoint-Videos instructional content

© Rehmani Consulting Inc, all rights reserved

Financial Institutions may Realize Considerable Savings by Using SharePoint 2010 to Support Regulatory Compliance Efforts

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We read with some interest an article written by Susan Feinberg, Big Demands for Small Banks. This article was published on August 6, 2012 on the Computerworld web site. What caught our attention in this article was Ms. Feinberg’s observation ” . . . that small banks may have to start investing in compliance technology instead of customer-support technology and improvements to operational efficiency.” in order to comply with new proposals published by the US Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

Fortunately, we think that many of these banks have implemented SharePoint (either 2007 or 2010). As we noted in several posts to this blog published in the fall of 2011, there is an excellent history of SharePoint implementations that have delivered highly useful information for Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) requirements. Most of these implementations have emphasized SharePoint metadata, and taxonomy to deliver this information. Therefore, we don’t see why small banks with working implementations of SharePoint 2010 enterprise edition ought to look much farther than to SharePoint, itself, for the computing resources required to satisfy the new reporting standards proposed by the above mentioned regulatory agencies.

Certainly, we offer video training content on this topic, either via subscriptions to all of the video training content on our website, www.sharepoint-videos.com, or through a purchase of a training DVD that we offer, SharePoint 2010 Term Store & Taxonomy. For a small bank with a 5 person team of SharePoint support personnel, the cost of equipping each member of the team with a thorough understanding of how to work with metadata, the Term Store & taxonomy for reporting purposes, via a purchase of an enterprise use license for our DVD, will amount to a one time charge of $200.00 per team member — merely 10% of the cost of sending each member to an in-person training class on the same topics.

Once a team of specialists is trained in the procedures required to implement SharePoint 2010 enterprise edition for regulatory reporting services there ought to be little reason to purchase any additional software to meet compliance requirements. As such, implementing SharePoint in this manner truly represents a highly efficient method of achieving compliance. If your bank faces a substantial new burden of compliance reporting requirements, but you have a working implementation of SharePoint 2010 enterprise edition in place, you ought to carefully consider achieving compliance with regulations with your SharePoint computing working environment. We can certainly help you frame your needs and develop a plan to achieve your objectives. You can either telephone us at +1 630-786-7026 or contact us via email with any questions you may have about this video, the InfoPath 2010 set, and possible applications for individual as well as organizational-level viewing and use.

As ever, use this link to place an order for an annual subscription to SharePoint-Videos instructional content

© Rehmani Consulting Inc, all rights reserved

Compile Accurate Business Intelligence Metrics with SQL Reporting Services 2008 R2 and SharePoint Server 2010

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As John Lauer and a team of supporting authors at Microsoft® made clear in a white paper, “How to Choose the Right Business Intelligence [BI] Technology to Suit Your Style”, “[b]usinesses, in an effort to stay one step ahead, collect large amounts of data ranging from demographics, buyer behavior, and customer loyalty to financial and operational data. Unfortunately the data is useless for decision making, its intended purpose, without a way of organizing and displaying it as meaningful information.” Whether the objective is better project portfolio management, the compilation of useful business key performance indicators (KPIs), balanced scorecards, or executive dashboards, enterprise business aspires to quantify activities into metrics that may be reliably analyzed to summarize present business conditions and, in turn, forecast future conditions.

The important point to chew in in the above quote, as we see it, is Mr. Lauer’s observation that the data is “useless for decision making” as is. Nevertheless, enterprise business continues to maintain a keen interest in working the metrics further to derive some value. The bet that enterprise business is making is that through the process of enhancing the productivity of tasks like “organizing and displaying” the data “as meaningful information” more valuable predictive and assessment observations may be supported by BI activities based upon historical and real-time collected data.

Microsoft’s SQL Reporting Services 2008 R2 is one of several tools that Microsoft has developed for the BI market. As noted in the Introduction to Mr. Lauer’s white paper, “[a]ll of these tools can be surfaced through the familiar SharePoint Server interface”, which contributes to our interest in this topic. We offer a comprehensive set of video tutorials on Reporting Services using SharePoint 2010 and Report Builder 3.0. This set of tutorials is authored by Bruce Herz an acknowledged industry expert on the topic. The intended audience for this set of tutorials includes SharePoint Administators, developers, SQL Server Administrators, and architects. We also think it makes sense for project managers and business analysts to review this training content as they will gain an understanding of the options for presentation and compilation that are opened through the use of these tools.

We are keen to speak with enterprise businesses with a commitment to high standards for BI activities who are considering the use of SQL Server 2008 R2 within a computing environrment where preferences are for browser based data ccess and, to an extent, manipulation. You may reach us at (630) 786-7026, or Contact Us to further a discussion about our video training content.

As ever, use this link to place an order for an annual subscription to SharePoint-Videos instructional content

© Rehmani Consulting Inc, all rights reserved