Business intelligence is a set of methodologies, technology, and processes that takes information stored in organizational systems and makes it actionable by putting it into the hands of the people who need it most so that they can make informed decisions. As a key part of the Microsoft business intelligence platform, SharePoint Server 2010 can help extend business intelligence capabilities to everyone within an organization, so that everyone is able to access the right data to make the right decisions.
Your organization probably stores data in a variety of formats, such as databases, e-mail messages, and spreadsheet files. SharePoint Server 2010 helps you extract data from a variety of sources and present that data in ways that facilitate analysis and decision making.
Excel Services empowers decision makers to publish, share, and manage Excel workbooks on a SharePoint site. Other people in the organization can then modify cell values, formulas, and formatting from the browser as they analyze the data.
PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint Server 2010 can increase visibility into key organizational objectives and metrics, and enable richer depth of analysis and insight. You or others in your organization can create and use interactive dashboards with scorecards, reports, and filters to find trends. You can also add rich charts to your SharePoint sites and connect the charts to data from a variety of sources, such as SharePoint lists, external data lists, Business Data Connectivity Services, Excel Services, or other Web Parts.
Capabilities of SharePoint Server
The capabilities of SharePoint Server 2010 are focused in six areas. This article briefly introduces each of these capabilities and then links to related articles where you can learn more.
Collaboration and social computing
SharePoint Server 2010 extends the collaboration features of SharePoint Foundation by promoting easy authoring from the browser or from familiar applications such as Microsoft Word, helping users relate resources with tagging and ratings, and helping people find answers faster through news feeds and people search.
One of the primary places where you can take advantage of these capabilities is on your My Site. My Site is your own SharePoint site where you can share documents, links, and information about yourself in an online profile. You can also blog about topics of interest or search for the information you need to do your job.
Enterprise Content Management
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) from Microsoft helps organizations overcome the challenges posed by large volumes of unmanaged content. SharePoint Server 2010 is a central part of the Microsoft ECM solution, which extends content management to every employee in an organization through integration with familiar tools such as the Microsoft Office system. The Microsoft ECM solution provides capabilities for managing the entire life cycle of content — from creation, to editing and collaboration, to expiration — on a single unified platform.
SharePoint Server 2010 helps organizations manage the entire life cycle of content by providing distinct sets of features that enable organizations to achieve the following goals:
Manage diverse content The document management capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010 help organizations consolidate diverse content from multiple locations into a centrally managed repository with consistent categorization. The new document sets feature enables your organization to create and manage work products that span multiple documents. Integrated search capabilities help people find, share, and use this information. Metadata management capabilities such as the new Term Store feature can help organizations to centrally manage metadata across sites. Metadata is information about data that is used to help identify, structure, discover, and manage information. New support for metadata-driven navigation, and the ability to embed metadata fields in documents improves information search and discovery. Content can also be protected from unauthorized access. Collaboration tools, such as workflow, help people work better together to create, review, and approve documents in a structured way.
Satisfy compliance and legal requirements The records management capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010 enable organizations to store and protect business records, either in-place next to in-progress records or in a locked down central repository. Organizations can apply expiration policies to records to ensure that they are retained for the appropriate time period to comply with regulations or corporate business policies, thereby mitigating legal risk to the organization. Audit trails provide proof to internal and external auditors that records were retained appropriately. Holds can be placed upon specific records under legal discovery to prevent their destruction.
Efficiently manage multiple Web sites The Web content management capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010 enable people to publish Web content with an easy-to-use content authoring tool and a built-in approval process. Employees can upload content — including images, audio, and video — to Web sites in a timely manner without extensive support from IT staff. New support for rich media includes a new Asset Library, with rich views and pickers; support for videos as a SharePoint content type; a streaming video infrastructure, and a skinable Silverlight media player. Templates in the form of master pages and page layouts enable organizations to apply consistent branding to pages. Built-in Web analytics features provide support for Traffic, Search, and Inventory analytics reports. SharePoint Server 2010 also offers a single deployment and management infrastructure for intranet, extranet, and Internet sites, as well as for multilingual sites.
Your organization probably stores data in a variety of formats, such as databases, e-mail messages, and spreadsheet files. SharePoint Server 2010 helps you extract data from a variety of sources and present that data in ways that facilitate analysis and decision making.
Excel Services empowers decision makers to publish, share, and manage Excel workbooks on a SharePoint site. Other people in the organization can then modify cell values, formulas, and formatting from the browser as they analyze the data.
PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint Server 2010 can increase visibility into key organizational objectives and metrics, and enable richer depth of analysis and insight. You or others in your organization can create and use interactive dashboards with scorecards, reports, and filters to find trends. You can also add rich charts to your SharePoint sites and connect the charts to data from a variety of sources, such as SharePoint lists, external data lists, Business Data Connectivity Services, Excel Services, or other Web Parts.
Capabilities of SharePoint Server
The capabilities of SharePoint Server 2010 are focused in six areas. This article briefly introduces each of these capabilities and then links to related articles where you can learn more.
Collaboration and social computing
SharePoint Server 2010 extends the collaboration features of SharePoint Foundation by promoting easy authoring from the browser or from familiar applications such as Microsoft Word, helping users relate resources with tagging and ratings, and helping people find answers faster through news feeds and people search.
One of the primary places where you can take advantage of these capabilities is on your My Site. My Site is your own SharePoint site where you can share documents, links, and information about yourself in an online profile. You can also blog about topics of interest or search for the information you need to do your job.
Enterprise Content Management
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) from Microsoft helps organizations overcome the challenges posed by large volumes of unmanaged content. SharePoint Server 2010 is a central part of the Microsoft ECM solution, which extends content management to every employee in an organization through integration with familiar tools such as the Microsoft Office system. The Microsoft ECM solution provides capabilities for managing the entire life cycle of content — from creation, to editing and collaboration, to expiration — on a single unified platform.
SharePoint Server 2010 helps organizations manage the entire life cycle of content by providing distinct sets of features that enable organizations to achieve the following goals:
Manage diverse content The document management capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010 help organizations consolidate diverse content from multiple locations into a centrally managed repository with consistent categorization. The new document sets feature enables your organization to create and manage work products that span multiple documents. Integrated search capabilities help people find, share, and use this information. Metadata management capabilities such as the new Term Store feature can help organizations to centrally manage metadata across sites. Metadata is information about data that is used to help identify, structure, discover, and manage information. New support for metadata-driven navigation, and the ability to embed metadata fields in documents improves information search and discovery. Content can also be protected from unauthorized access. Collaboration tools, such as workflow, help people work better together to create, review, and approve documents in a structured way.
Satisfy compliance and legal requirements The records management capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010 enable organizations to store and protect business records, either in-place next to in-progress records or in a locked down central repository. Organizations can apply expiration policies to records to ensure that they are retained for the appropriate time period to comply with regulations or corporate business policies, thereby mitigating legal risk to the organization. Audit trails provide proof to internal and external auditors that records were retained appropriately. Holds can be placed upon specific records under legal discovery to prevent their destruction.
Efficiently manage multiple Web sites The Web content management capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010 enable people to publish Web content with an easy-to-use content authoring tool and a built-in approval process. Employees can upload content — including images, audio, and video — to Web sites in a timely manner without extensive support from IT staff. New support for rich media includes a new Asset Library, with rich views and pickers; support for videos as a SharePoint content type; a streaming video infrastructure, and a skinable Silverlight media player. Templates in the form of master pages and page layouts enable organizations to apply consistent branding to pages. Built-in Web analytics features provide support for Traffic, Search, and Inventory analytics reports. SharePoint Server 2010 also offers a single deployment and management infrastructure for intranet, extranet, and Internet sites, as well as for multilingual sites.
