BI on SharePoint

Getting reports onto SharePoint is an important step in centralizing knowledge and increasing awareness of a company's available Business Intelligence. Unfortunately, people shy away from taking this step because it seems like something that would require a lot of time, effort and expense. This two part series will illustrate the process of putting BI on SharePoint, remove some of the mystery around it and hopefully encourage further investigation.  Part one will cover the setup and part two will illustrate working with SSRS reports within SharePoint.

I was recently tasked with diagnosing a slow performing report in Microsoft’s SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS).  The report was intended as a dashboard with multiple charts and tables showing various trending business performance metrics.  Conceptually, the report was sound.  The charts and tables showed exactly what the business users required.  The problem was the dashboard rendered itself slower than the business desired.

My investigation showed the single dashboard viewed by users was actually multiple subreports rendered together as a single SSRS report.

SSRS supports the inclusion of subreports in any SSRS report; a subreport is simply an independent SSRS report embedded into another SSRS report.  In Visual Studio BIDS, you simply drag the Subreport component from the SSRS Toolbox to the Design tab and complete the Subreport Properties.  Using a subreport is easy.

Gartner predicts that 30% of all BI will be consumed on mobile devices by 2013.  With the amount of interest in mobile BI and those kinds of bold predictions you would think it would be easy to understand the options available.  It is not.  There are a lot of things to consider when deciding what mobile BI tool and operating system fits for your organization:

Gartner recently released an updated version of the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms. One quick glance at the new Magic Quadrant and you’ll notice there are a whopping 19 entries this year, with 8 companies making the prestigious leader quadrant.  When compared to the 4 leaders in the Data Integration magic quadrant and 6 in the data warehouse space it is clear there is a lot happening in the world of Business Intelligence.

This write up contains a high level investigation of the Business Intelligence solution offering from Microsoft (SQL Server Reporting Services or SSRS) and the offering from SAP, the Business Objects base reporting package (BOBJ).  While BOBJ does have more options for reporting and presentation, from a basic report feature standpoint both of the tools offer similar functionality and offer the user a great deal of flexibility in the presentation of their data.  The other difference between the two solutions that needs to be considered is the expense associated with the Total Cost of Ownership.  While you will have similar costs in the requirements gathering, design, development, testing, and ongoing administration, there is a significant difference in the licensing cost of these products.  While BOBJ charges by either named user or CPU, SSRS comes with SQL Server so there are no additional costs with adding a BI tool set.

SQL Server and Sharepoint offer a quality BI solution, which meets basic architectural principles and business requirements.  Because of Microsoft’s desire to establish itself in the BI space, it offers the BI components with a license to SQL Server.  The lack of flashy, AJAX style reporting features (which are often shown in demos of BOBJ) may limit the business’s interest in SQL Server.  Additionally, BOBJ’s reporting, ad hoc queries, dashboard, data visualization capabilities are key strengths of the SAP BOBJ product suite and are among top rated BI tools.

When considering the total cost of ownership, a company must consider the individual components that make up this expense.  Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) comes from the High Level Business Requirements, Software Selection Process, Software Installation, Detailed Requirements, Design, Development, System and User Acceptance Testing, Production Software Licenses, the ongoing Maintenance of the solution.   While many of these costs would be similar across the two platforms, a company needs to assess the differences in development time, and ongoing maintenance and understand which tool their personnel and IT infrastructure can support.  Specific costs and return on investments are highly dependent on company’s specific situations and deployment choices.  From our specific client exposure, mid-market companies do not opt for BOBJ, and we find that SQL Server is more prevalent.  An SSRS solution will often be lower cost from a licensing perspective as all components are included with a SQL Server license.  However, SSRS requires a developer to build their reports, where BOBJ supports an end business user self-service model.  So long term technical support and development costs could actually be lower with BOBJ.

Because many companies already own SQL Server licenses within their infrastructure, the ease and low cost benefits of implementation may be too good to pass up.  However, companies either without SQL Server in house or requiring heavily visual reports accessible to business users or self-service access to information with minimal IT support may want to implement BOBJ as their BI stack.