SQL Server

The foundation of the Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) offering, Microsoft SQL Server is a complete, enterprise-ready, highly secure and scalable BI and data warehouse platform. It offers the features and functionality you need to put critical, timely information in the hands of employees across your organisation.

SQL Server can help you gain greater insight from your business information and achieve faster results for a competitive advantage. SQL Server also gives you the ability to: 

 SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)

For most companies, the quantity of data is not a problem. Organisational and technological problems arise when your data is detached and dispersed in multiple operational systems, databases, and external third-party feeds. These issues can make data integration the most expensive part of a business intelligence (BI) project.

Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services provides a scalable, extensible solution that helps you easily and quickly integrate data from any source. Integration Services is designed to perform complex data integration, transformation, and synthesis at high speeds and in a continuous environment for large data volumes. Integration Services can help you easily build, manage, and deploy solutions that bring your data under control in a consolidated, centralised, and managed environment.

SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)

To solve complex business problems and gain insight into the performance of your organisation, you need to be able to rapidly and effectively analyse data. Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services is the online analytical processing (OLAP) engine and data mining platform within SQL Server.

An integral component of Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI), Analysis Services provides a central place that serves as the single version of truth for your reports, spreadsheets, key performance indicators (KPIs), and analytical applications. 

With Analysis Services, you can put your data in a format that is optimised for rapid query and analysis and from which you can easily generate and store KPIs. This can help you access the BI information you need to understand what's happening in your business and predict what will happen in the future.

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)

Business intelligence (BI) helps you tackle one of biggest challenges your organisation faces: getting the right information into the hands of the right people. SQL Server Reporting Services is a comprehensive managed reporting solution that supports the entire report lifecycle. 

With Reporting Services you can create, personalise, manage, and deliver reports from different data sources in a variety of formats, including traditional paper-based reports, as well as interactive, Web-based, embedded, and ad hoc reports.

2007 Office System

An integral component of the Microsoft BI offering, the 2007 Microsoft Office system is a complete set of desktop and server software that can help simplify how individuals and teams throughout your entire organisation access, analyse, and share data. 

In addition to significant enhancements to its BI capabilities, the 2007 Microsoft Office system offers a new user interface, innovative collaboration and workflow tools, content management features, and powerful, easy-to-use enterprise search.

You may find that you already use some of these products in your organisation. Often, companies that widely use one Office system product are able to deliver new functionality to people by adding in new capabilities found in other products. And with each product fully integrated into the Office infrastructure, IT managers can have the confidence that they're not adding another vendor footprint to the roster.

2007 Microsoft Office System: Excel   

For business intelligence (BI) efforts to be successful, you need to use the tools and processes that your employees are familiar with, and those tools must make it easy to distribute data across your organization in a timely manner. 

Microsoft Office Excel is the most commonly used tool to access, analyze, and share information. And the 2007 release of the Microsoft Office system offers huge improvements in ease of use, security, and access to centrally managed, trusted data stores. Changes include:

• Tight integration between Office Excel 2007 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services so you can use the familiar Excel spreadsheet environment for exploratory data analysis.  
• Powerful data mining features and rich data visualisation schemes to help you discover and illustrate important trends and exceptions in your data. 
• A completely revised user interface. 
• Increased data capacity. 
• Significant improvements for data sharing and security. 
• The fastest Office spreadsheet calculation to date.