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Microsoft Enterprise Dashboard Screenshots

Dashboard Topic:

Microsoft Dashboard

Continuing on our whirlwind tour of the enterprise dashboard vendors covered in the Meta Group study of enteprise reporting and dashboard vendors, we get to Microsoft. One note concerning the Microsoft business intelligence offerings. As you know, Microsoft has agressively moved into this space via the repositioning of their current products, introduction of new BI platforms and products, and the acquisiton of other products in this space. As a result, it can be somewhat confusing figuring out exactly what product to look at when considering Microsoft for an enterprise dashboard project. From the new Excel 2007 which has nifty features right out of the box perfect for executive dashboard visualization to the new Sharepoint 2007 to the behind-the-scenes ability of SQL Server, there are many options to consider.

BTW, for an interesting read on Microsoft’s move into BI, take a look at this article.

Here is a map of the Microsoft BI solution stack. I found it at the great BI blog, Bidirectional.

Microsoft enterprise dashboard solutions

In this Microsoft Business Intelligence technology stack, we have:

  • Business Scorecard Manager (BSM)
  • Microsoft SharePoint Portal Products & Technologies
  • Microsoft Excel
  • QL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
  • SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)
  • SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
  • SQL Server Relational Database Management System (SSRDBMS)

Now, given the above, let’s get back to looking at the Meta Group’s assessment. In that study, Microsoft achieved a rating of 4.1 which tied them with SAS for fifth place. Note that in the 2005 study, Meta focused on Microsoft’s SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS):

Microsoft Reporting Services 1.0 SP2

Microsoft Reporting Services is a new entrant to the enterprise reporting and dashboards market space. Reporting Services is not sold as a separate product. Rather, it is bundled with the SQL/Server database product. This has resulted in Reporting Services being widely distributed in a short period of time, though the actual of use of the product is not known. The integration of Reporting Services with Visual Studio offers developers a familiar environment for development. However, Reporting Services lacks native data connectivity to most other applications (e.g. typically ODBC or OLE DB connectivity support). In addition, despite market awareness and attractive price point, we have not seen many large enterprises standardize on
it for enterprise reporting.

Strengths

• Connecting to Oracle natively supported out of the box
• All reports available as a Web services
• Best-in-class usability
• Above-average score in pricing; Microsoft offers one of lowest-cost enterprise reporting solutions

Limitations

• Minimal (formatting and limited formulas support) integration with Excel
• No support of non-relational legacy data sources
• No support of heterogeneous joins
• No support for sharing of parameters across a series of reports or reuse of parameters

 

The Microsoft Dashboard screenshots shown here will be a mix of various Microsoft BI products. Please excuse the uncategorized nature of these selections, but you can search the rest of this blog for particular types of Microsoft enterprise dashboards.

MS Office 2007 Enterprise Dashboard

Microsoft business scorecard

Excel dashboard

Sharepoint Enteprise Dashboard

Tags: Microsoft Dashboard

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Last Modified: Thursday, August 9th, 2007 @ 14:03

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 11:44 am and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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