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In a partnership agreement with Pragmatic Works, SSWUG.ORG’s virtual class is designed to help you use SharePoint 2010 to bring Business Intelligence to the forefront for your users and customers.
Mark Stacey, course instructor and founder of Pragmatic Works’ South Africa office, will start by showing how to configure SharePoint 2010 and explaining the parts all interconnect. Then, Mark will dive into PerformancePoint, explaining how to deliver actionable scorecards for your executives and management team. He will also describe how Reporting Services can deliver beautiful reports and dashboards for your users in a SharePoint environment. Finally, Mark will demonstrate how to use PowerPivot to give your users self-service BI for their departments and how to use Excel Services for visualization.
The target of this class is developers, architects or IT professionals who have basic experience with Reporting Services and SSAS cube-browsing already. Very little time is spent in the class on the basics of Reporting Services and general cube concepts. No previous knowledge of SharePoint is required for this class.
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Session 1 – Introduction to SharePoint as a Business Intelligence Platform – As a document management solution, SharePoint is very different when using it for Business Intelligence than when used for other purposes. In this session, Mark Stacey will introduce you to the capabilities of SharePoint, and the strategies to use when implementing the collaboration software.
Session 02 – Configuration of SharePoint as a Business Intelligence Platform – SharePoint is made up of many different components, each of which needs to be setup correctly. In this session, Mark will go over configuration of the Secure Store Service for storing authentication details, PerformancePoint services for creating dashboards, Excel Services to enable users to publish their excel documents to the web and the intricacies of configuring SharePoint to support PowerPivot.
Session 03 – Structuring a SharePoint Site for Supporting Self-service Business – In this session, Mark will explain how to structure a SharePoint structure in a way that empowers business users to create self-service analytic applications.
Session 04 – Introduction to PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer – Mark Stacey will introduce PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer, and go through the steps to create Key Performance Indicators and then combine them in scorecards to present a unified view of the business. He will also cover analytic chart and grid creation, explaining how these tools can provide for ad hoc analysis by a user. The session finishes off by showing techniques used to deploy PerformancePoint dashboards from one environment to another.
Session 05 – Additional PerformancePoint Features – PerformancePoint goes beyond just scorecards and charts. In this session, Mark will show how to present a strategy map, made famous for its use in the Balanced Scorecard, and also to create more complex connections between PerformancePoint components.
Session 06 – SQL Server Reporting Services in SharePoint – Many people are aware of Reporting Services, but few have successfully integrated it with SharePoint. Mark explains how to create a report without opening Visual Studio, how to publish this report and connect it to other components within SharePoint.
Session 07 – Choosing a Microsoft Business Intelligence Technology – The Microsoft Business Intelligence stack has a myriad of technologies, each of which has its own place. So, choosing a tool can be difficult. In this session, the choices and the reasons for those choices are clearly laid out by Mark.
Session 08 – Excel and Excel Services – Excel is the most powerful self-service Business Intelligence tool, but the challenge has always been to have one version of the truth, while still supporting user-driven analysis. In this session, Excel Services is setup to support self-service Business Intelligence, and some key Excel techniques for reporting from a cube are shown.
Session 09 – Introduction to PowerPivot – PowerPivot is one of the more powerful technologies to come out of Microsoft in recent years, allowing users to combine multiple data sources themselves. Students are introduced to it in this session.
Session 10 – Class Hijack! Overview of Project “Crescent” with Brian Knight – Brian Knight, SQL Server MVP and founder of Pragmatic Works, hijacks Mark’s class to provide a brief overview of Microsoft’s SQL Server Project “Crescent” with Sam Brace, community manager for SSWUG.ORG. He demonstrates how easy it is to use this immersive ad-hoc visualization tool that is part of SQL Server Code Name “Denali” Reporting Services.
Session 11 – SharePoint as a Data Source – Not all data is stored within the data warehouse. In this session, Mark shows how to surface data from SharePoint within dashboards.
Session 12 – Using SharePoint for Unstructured Content alongside Business Intelligence Information – Many executives prefer paper-based reports to electronic ones, as they can attach documents and make comments. In this session, Mark demonstrates how to use the capabilities of SharePoint to provide the same utility.
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Mark Stacey founded the A
phelion Software Group, and works tirelessly to cross the business / technical boundaries in Business Intelligence, working in both SharePoint and SQL.
He has published 2 books on BI – Sharepoint 2010 BI and Visual Intelligence; founded the BIDN user group in Johannesburg, and frequently speaks at both SQL Saturday and SharePoint Saturday events.
Mark’s focus of late has been in two streams – custom HTML5 visualisations and Microsoft’s Parallel Data Warehouse – he has built a D3.js based HTML5 visualisation framework, and delivered the first PDW in the Middle-East/Africa region.
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