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Traditionally, when Microsoft business intelligence is included in a business intelligence project, most people automatically think of SharePoint. That is because SharePoint acts as a central portal or repository that you can easily access using any modern web browser. Instead of using multiple disparate technologies for the business intelligence solution, SharePoint can render both Microsoft and non-Microsoft reporting visualizations.

It is a common practice that individuals, teams, departments, or organizations will evaluate and select a reporting tool based on a variety of factors. These tools then tend to proliferate themselves within the department and become part of daily operations. Once the discussion of a business intelligence solution begins, it is often difficult to persuade the groups away from their established tool of choice. However, using SharePoint means the IT group responsible for the business intelligence project can couple existing report artifacts with new technologies to produce a fully functional and comprehensive solution via a single interface. Figure 1.7 provides a pseudo view of what a SharePoint-developed solution may look like.

Figure 1.7 Pseudo SharePoint page displaying multiple technologies

In SharePoint, you can develop custom pages that consume other technologies. Figure 1.7 integrates four different technologies into a single view. The resulting web page centralizes four distinct views of data spanning features that are made available by different software vendors. In addition to customized pages, business intelligence developers can leverage Performance Point, a dashboarding feature of SharePoint. The details of Performance Point are discussed in the next section.

While SharePoint does offer this extended capability of integrating disparate technologies, the Microsoft business intelligence stack does provide a sufficient number of tools and features for deploying a holistic business intelligence solution. Therefore, if an organization is evaluating vendor solutions, leveraging SharePoint typically addresses all the business intelligence needs for a given project.