SharePoint Insights
BI for Everyone

New and Improved

• Excel Services
• PerformancePoint Services
• Visio Services
• Chart Web Parts

SharePoint 2010 includes new capabilities, including rich scorecards, dynamic dashboards, and easy-to-use Chart Web Parts, that give people more flexibility when working with data to make business decisions. Using the SharePoint 2010 Insights capabilities, people can turn raw data into usable reports without involving developers or server administrators in the process. They can increase their productivity and make prompt, informed decisions using the familiar, decentralized user interface in SharePoint 2010. They can also interact with data, work with key performance indicators, perform analytics, and create their own data visualizations.

Excel Services

Increasingly, people use Microsoft Excel to enter, store, and analyze data. As the use of Excel has increased, so has the need to share the results (for example, graphs, charts, spreadsheets) with colleagues and customers. Often, people share spreadsheets through e-mail messages. For example, Joe sends a spreadsheet to Ursula, who makes a change and forwards it to Phillip. Phillip then makes another change to the spreadsheet and sends it to someone else.

This method of sharing causes a problem: a loss of control. Not only does Joe, the original author, lose control of the content in the spreadsheet, but he loses control of the intellectual property in the spreadsheet (for example, formulas that are not meant to be distributed).

With Excel Services, people can meet their business needs by using Excel 2010 to create and modify spreadsheets. However, by using Excel Services, people can now maintain control over the spreadsheets in many ways and provide a single version of correct information.

People can take spreadsheets created in Excel 2010 and publish them to Excel Services in SharePoint 2010. After defining the trusted location of the spreadsheet, they can allow other SharePoint site users to view the spreadsheet in their browsers. Authors can also protect the intellectual property embedded in spreadsheets because the information is not displayed in the versions published in the browser. For example, Joe can define the aggregated revenue figures for regional sales information as the trusted location of the spreadsheet while hiding the detailed revenue figures for each salesperson in the region that the financial details are based on.

Figure 23 Excel 2010 workbook published using Excel Services for SharePoint 2010

In SharePoint 2010, Excel Services increases fidelity to the experience in Excel 2010. People can use Excel Services to gain interactive capabilities like sorting, filtering, and working with PivotTables, plus new features like PowerPivot, visual slicers, and sparklines—small charts that convey a lot of information in simple terms. Excel Services for SharePoint 2010 supports more Excel features and larger workbooks, improving performance. Developers can use new programmability features, such as a new REST API and JavaScript Object Model, to create rich and dynamic business applications.

Figure 24 Published Excel workbook with functionality using the JavaScript Object Model

Excel 2010 introduces new data visualizations and conditional formatting capabilities, including negative data bars, multiple icon sets, right-aligned data bars, and sparklines. When placed in an Excel cell, sparklines dramatically improve the data visualization for fast comparison. Excel Services in SharePoint 2010 can render these new data visualizations and conditional formatting capabilities when creating or publishing spreadsheets in the browser.

Excel Services also provides a rich API and Web services that offer developers extensibility points for custom solutions. Developers can use a new REST API to easily access the data within a spreadsheet, which they can use to create mash-ups or other advanced customized solutions. Developers can also use a new JavaScript object model to create dynamic applications that use the same data.

PerformancePoint Services

Almost every business intelligence implementation uses scorecards and dashboards. Scorecards are collections of KPIs and objectives that people use to measure multiple performance factors in a business. A dashboard is a group of related objects that help companies quickly understand their performance.

Dashboards can include scorecards, reports, spreadsheets, and diagrams; they may also contain filters that all scorecards and KPIs use to control the context of reports and visualizations. Microsoft PerformancePoint™ Services helps companies view and manage key drivers of the business and tie them to the corporate strategy.

Figure 25 KPI detail view in PerformancePoint Services

People can further analyze relevant data and make better decisions with new visualizations like the decomposition tree, a view of the factors that have a great impact on business. Scorecards now contain KPI details highlighting ownership, date stamps, and thresholds, which provide complete transparency of strategic initiatives and processes. People can find the right information with new filtering and sorting capabilities such as Top/Bottom filtering, switching measures, and drilling across dimensions.

People can easily create dynamic dashboards and scorecards with improvements to Dashboard Designer, a dedicated tool to that can aggregate data and content from multiple sources into a single view. With Dashboard Designer, people can create rich, dynamic, and interactive dashboards displaying the right information from sources like Excel, SQL Server Analysis Services, SharePoint lists, and Web page content. They can deploy rich dashboards by publishing to SharePoint 2010 with a single click, displaying them through a Web browser. They can also deploy business intelligence seamlessly and easily throughout the company and access the content they need when they need it.

PerformancePoint Services is now tightly integrated with and included as part of SharePoint 2010. Because PerformancePoint Services is no longer a stand-alone product, people can quickly assemble dashboards using the data sources available across SharePoint, Office, and SQL Server for reporting, analytics, scorecards, and dynamic dashboards. PerformancePoint Services is also now a part of the SharePoint security and administration services, and stores all content in SharePoint lists. This means that companies can set up PerformancePoint Services as part of deploying SharePoint 2010, while using the rich SharePoint architecture for scalability and availability.

Visio Services

SharePoint 2010 now includes Visio Services, which lets people render Visio diagrams and charts within a browser. SharePoint 2010 treats Visio files as first-class document types, like Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files, so people can easily open a Visio diagram from a document library. Additionally, it indexes the contents of the Visio diagram so they will be fully accessible within search results.

Figure 26 Editing Visio diagrams with Visio Services

People can use Visio 2010 to create sophisticated data visualizations to transform raw data into more dynamic diagrams. They can also use SharePoint 2010 Excel Services in Visio 2010 as a data source when creating visualizations, which allows them to use published spreadsheets, SQL Server database cubes, or SharePoint lists as data sources for Visio 2010 visualizations. People can connect Visio diagrams to other

SharePoint Web Parts, such as filters, to create dynamic views, and can combine Visio diagrams with other data-driven Web Parts as part of a SharePoint dashboard page. With a rich JavaScript object model, people can use Visio diagrams create new and interactive business applications, such as mash-ups, to solve immediate business problems. For more information about the power of combining solutions in SharePoint 2010, see SharePoint Composites.

Chart Web Parts

As people increasingly manage information through SharePoint, they must be able to visualize and share that information to help decision makers base their choices on relevant and up-to-date data. People can use step-by-step wizards to add Chart Web Parts to SharePoint Web pages and then configure them to visually represent the data. People can quickly and easily follow the steps because the wizards offer a rich set of options and familiar user interface.

Figure 27 Chart Web Part