Information is vital to any organisation, but making sure it’s well-ordered and centralised is only half the battle. Equally crucial is ensuring everyone has the right information, and ensuring they know how to take advantage of it to make better decisions. Microsoft BI reporting tools help individuals manage, discuss, and share data, while analysis tools are instrumental in turning raw figures into insight.

Reporting
SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services delivers meaningful reports to decision-makers. Whether you have a small audience which requires a once-off report from a limited amount of data, or a large audience that demands regular reporting containing evaluation, forecasting and further input from other departments, Microsoft BI can help. Reporting Services deliver across the entire reporting procedure, from authoring through to delivery, while combining the benefits of a centralised reporting system with the flexibility and convenience of a web-based application.

Analysis
SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services help you turn raw data into insight and understanding; it’s the online analytical processing (OLAP) engine and data mining platform within SQL Server. Analysis Services can help you understand why your business has changed; from providing you with a detailed analysis of data in the report you’re reading to helping you build scorecards and other performance management applications.

Office Excel 2007 constitutes the latest improvement to the venerable office suite application. Tight integration with SQL Server 2005 and advanced data mining features allow you to analyse and explore your organisation’s data within the familiar environment of an Excel spreadsheet. A revised user interface, greater security and the fastest spreadsheet calculation to date make discovering, visualising and forecasting change a faster and easier process than ever before.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides an integrated portal which connects people to information, wherever they are located in your organisation. In addition to helping users interact with spreadsheets, KPI’s and dashboards, even unstructured data such as Office documents, web-pages and PDF’s can be accessed and analysed. Because all content is centralised users can utilise capabilities native to SharePoint server such as search, management, collaboration and – the most recent introduction – Excel Services, which enables interaction with Excel spreadsheets in