Insight Enterprise provides advanced analytic capabilities from a centralized server, through a web interface, without the effort or user-disconnect traditionally associated with web based applications. Knowledge workers are empowered to build and publish reports without specialist support or the need for programming, by using an environment they are familiar with. Insight Enterprise is designed to work with established technologies such as SharePoint 2007 and Excel 2007.

Reports can be designed using Excel 2007 and then published to SharePoint and viewed by anyone granted permission. A user may drill into a report in more detail or they can open it in Excel to analyze further. In addition, Insight Enterprise supports Reporting Services, a tool from Microsoft designed for large scale enterprise reporting, featuring dynamic data links, report subscription and multiple export format options.

Microsoft Excel together with a SharePoint 2007 web portal provides a comprehensive business intelligence interface. Insight has enhanced the standard functionality that comes with these tools to work seamlessly with the Insight Enterprise data warehouse. These enhancements include SharePoint site definitions and web-parts and an additional menu added to Excel 2007.

SharePoint

Microsoft’s SharePoint Server 2007 is designed to enable business to:

• Get more out of their information, 
• Streamline their business processes, 
• Simplify the way people work together, and
• Ease server administration, extensibility, and interoperability.

As such, it is a natural choice for a business intelligence interface.

SharePoint provides centralized, web-based access to information and improved abilities to locate relevant content, which give users a single place to locate information, no matter what format it is in. Typically reports dynamically integrated with the Insight Enterprise database and applications will use Dashboards, Excel Services or Reporting Services. In addition, SharePoint may be used to manage documents in any format and other electronic content such as Web pages, PDF files, and e-mail messages, providing comprehensive control over the storage, security, distribution, and reuse of this material.

This provides users with consistent user experience through familiar client applications and team collaboration tools, while administrators benefit from a single, integrated platform with a consistent administrative interface to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications.

Excel Services

Excel Services empowers users to publish and run spreadsheets on the server, enabling users to access these spreadsheets through a Web browser without the need for any custom browser components or a local copy of Excel 2007.

Dashboards

SharePoint Server 2007 enables the creation of rich, interactive business intelligence dashboards that assemble and display information from multiple sources by using built-in Web Parts.

Users are empowered to build and publish their own dashboards by using these Web Parts to visualize information from various sources, including

• Dynamic Key Performance Indicators (KPIs),
• Excel Services and Reporting Services Reports, and
• Filters.

Reporting Services

Reporting Services is Microsoft’s enterprise reporting tool and is typically used for reports that are intended to be distributed in a paper based format.

Excel

Insight Enterprise integrates naturally with Microsoft Excel, the most widely used analytical tool to provide users with an enterprise-scale analytics in an environment they are familiar with.

Insight Enterprise provides a menu add-in to further enhance the integration with SharePoint.