Microsoft BI Solutions

Microsoft Business Intelligence Solutions
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Microsoft provides a complete Business Intelligence (BI) offering that helps decision makers improve business performance at strategic, tactical, and organizational levels. Microsoft® BI solutions provide your employees with reliable access to information they need to make informed decisions so they can respond swiftly and appropriately to changing conditions that impact your business. Microsoft BI is built on the powerful end-to-end Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 platform and is delivered throughout your organization via the familiar Microsoft Office® interface. This integrated approach means you can build and deploy robust BI applications for everyone throughout the company, while keeping costs under control.
 

The Business Intelligence professionals from Collective Intelligence will help your firm leverage the capabilities of the Microsoft BI tools to maximize the value of your data assets. Our solutions will help you integrate data from across your enterprise transforming it into information that your business users can understand and take action on to drive your business forward. The result will be improved business agility through faster more accurate business decisions. Additionally, we can help you solidify your relationship with your customers and business partners through improved service levels and enhanced business planning.

Microsoft Business Intelligence Stack

Integration Services
 
SQL Server 2005 offers a new data ETL platform, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). Formerly known as Data Transformation Services (DTS), SSIS has been redesigned to provide the functionality and high performance necessary to be an enterprise ETL platform. SSIS performs complex data integration, transformation, and synthesis at high speeds for very large data volumes, enabling you to more easily integrate and analyze data from multiple information sources. SSIS is fully programmable, embeddable, and extensible—characteristics that make it an ideal ETL platform.


Analysis Services
 
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services (SSAS) data mining and OLAP capabilities help you build complex analytical models that you can integrate with your business operations. Easy to use, extensible, and flexible capabilities make data mining more accessible than ever before.
·          Unified Dimensional Model provides a central metadata repository defining business entities, business logic, calculations, and metrics.
·          Data mining algorithms help you discover patterns and uncover business data to reveal hidden trends.
·          Proactive caching delivers a highly compressed and optimized data cache that is automatically maintained as the data in the underlying source databases changes.
·          Advanced BI capabilities
Ø        Translations – Translations provide a simple and centrally managed mechanism for storing and presenting analytic data to users in their preferred languages.
Ø        MDX Scripts – Multidimensional Expression Scripts are the new mechanism for defining calculated members, named sets, and cell calculations.
Ø        BI Wizards – A set of easy-to-use wizards can help even novice users model some of the more complex business intelligence problems.
Ø        Semi- Additive Measures - This new measure aggregation type for advance data modeling includes last-nonempty, last-child, first-child, and average-of-children.
Reporting Services
 
SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services (SSRS) uses flexible subscription and delivery mechanisms to help make it easy to create both traditional and interactive reports and deliver them to a wide range of people. SSRS combines the benefits of a centrally managed reporting system with the flexibility and on-demand nature of desktop and Web-based programs.
Embedded and managed through Web Services, SSRS offers a server-based enterprise reporting environment. You can personalize and deliver reports in a variety of formats, with a range of interactivity and printing options. Complex analyses can reach a broad audience through the distribution of reports as a data source for downstream business intelligence.
Notification Services
 
Microsoft SQL Server Notification Services allows users to create subscriptions to notification applications. A subscription is an expressed interest in a specific type of event. For example, subscriptions might express the following preferences: "Notify me when my stock price reaches $70.00," or "Notify me when the strategy document my team is writing is updated." A notification can be generated and sent to the subscriber as soon as a triggering event occurs. A notification can also be generated and sent on a predetermined schedule specified by the subscriber. Notifications can be sent to a wide range of devices. For example, a notification can be sent to a subscriber's cellular phone, personal digital assistant (PDA), Microsoft Windows Messenger, or e-mail account. Because these devices often accompany the subscriber, notifications are ideal for sending important information.
 
Replication Services
 
Microsoft SQL Server Replication Services provides data replication for distributed or mobile data processing applications, high systems availability, scalable concurrency with secondary data stores for enterprise reporting solutions, and integration with heterogeneous systems, including existing Oracle databases. Replication is a set of technologies for copying and distributing data and database objects from one database to another and then synchronizing between databases to maintain consistency. Using replication, you can distribute data to different locations and to remote or mobile users over local and wide area networks, dial-up connections, wireless connections, and the Internet.
Relational Database
 
SQL Server 2005 offers a security-enhanced, scalable, and highly available relational database engine with improved performance and support for structured and unstructured XML data.
·          Table and index partitioning enables fast data load and simplified maintenance for large tables.
·          Online index operations help you create, rebuild, or drop an index online.
·          Enhanced Transact-SQL (T-SQL) language capabilities offer error handling, recursive queries, and XML support.
·          Database mirroring provides a quick standby system for high availability.
·          Database snapshots create quick, read-only views of a database.
·          Snapshot isolation enables read operations to access the last-committed row even if a write operation has the row locked for an update at that time.
·          Support for 64-bit opens the door to new levels of application scalability.
·          SQL Server Management Studio helps you operate and maintain BI database objects.
Microsoft Business Intelligence includes management tools and processes designed to help optimize corporate performance and improve customer satisfaction. By focusing on planning, forecasting, and other business priorities, these performance management tools help you make optimum use of your data assets. Equally important, you gain a single, common view of your company’s business processes and operational results.
 
Collective Intelligence offers Business Intelligence services that span the entire implementation life cycle including: planning, requirements analysis, data modeling, data warehouse/mart design and tuning, data acquisition, reporting, and training. Let Collective Intelligence assist you in putting these powerful Microsoft tools to work for your business.