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Sharing Up-to-Date Information in Convenient Locations

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As part of the Office Content Publishing group at Microsoft, our team writes Help content about business intelligence capabilities in SharePoint Server. In this blog, we'll look at how you can reuse and share your business intelligence content in team sites and other convenient locations.

Available in SharePoint Server 2010 is the Business Intelligence Center site template. You can use it to create and configure a place to store and organize your business intelligence content, manage user permissions to that content, and take advantage of content reusability.

Storing and Organizing Business Intelligence Content

The Business Intelligence Center serves as a central location where you can store and manage all your business intelligence content. It contains lists and libraries that contain specific kinds of content, including the following:

  • A Data Connections library that contains data sources that can be used by various applications, including Excel Services, PerformancePoint Services, Visio Services, Reporting Services, and so on.
  • A PerformancePoint Content list that contains dashboard items that were created by using Dashboard Designer, including data sources, reports, scorecards, key performance indicators (KPIs), dashboard filters, and dashboard pages.
  • A Dashboards library that contains published dashboards
  • A Documents library that you can use to store files. The Documents library also includes an Excel Services sample workbook.

Managing User Permissions to Business Intelligence Content

One really nice thing about the Business Intelligence Center is that once you set it up, users across your organization can access it, according to the permissions that are assigned to them. There are four main levels of permissions you can assign:

  • Read permissions that enable users to view information only
  • Contribute permissions that enable users to view, create, and edit items, such as data connections, reports, scorecards, KPIs, dashboard pages, and filters, but not to publish dashboards.
  • Design permissions that enable users to view, create, and edit items as well as publish dashboards.
  • Full Control permissions that enable users to view, create, edit items, publish dashboards, and view/change user permissions.

Reusing Business Intelligence Content

Another nice thing about the Business Intelligence Center is that it enables your organization to reuse items that have been created. For example, suppose that one dashboard author has created a nice sales report for a dashboard. Suppose that you want to use the same report in another dashboard. You can easily do that by using one of the following methods:

  • If the report and your dashboard are both created by using Dashboard Designer, you can simply open your dashboard for editing, and then add the report that you want to the page in Dashboard Designer. (For more information, see Add Items to a Dashboard Page.)
  • If either the report or your dashboard were not created by using Dashboard Designer, then you can use edit mode in SharePoint Server. Open a Web Part Page for editing, click "Add a Web Part" in a zone, and then use the Categories and Web Parts panes to locate the kind of Web Part that you want to add to the page. Then, click a link to open the tool pane for that Web Part, and specify the location and a name for the report. (For more information, see Creating Web Part Pages and Add a Web Part to a Page.)

You can reuse the same report in multiple locations, which cuts down on the time and effort required to share information.

More Information

Want more information about how to create, manage and share your business intelligence content? See the following resources:

Getting Started Content

Getting Started: Introduction to the Business Intelligence Center

Getting Started with Dashboards

Getting Started: PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer

Additional Content

Using Excel Services to Share Pieces and Parts of Excel Workbooks

Plan, Design, and Implement a PerformancePoint Dashboard

Create Data Connections by using Dashboard Designer

Create Reports and Scorecards by using Dashboard Designer

Create Dashboard Filters by using Dashboard Designer

Create and Assemble Dashboard Pages by using Dashboard Designer

Publish Dashboards by using Dashboard Designer

Our team is always interested in hearing from you. Please use Comments to give us your feedback. Is this information helpful? What else would you like to see? Let us know, and we will take that into account as we continue to publish more content.

Happy Dashboarding!

Denise Stendera

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 14, 2011
    Could you please make the links that activate Help context sensitive. It is very annoying to always have to start at the top of the help file to navigate and search for content. This is a big problem throughout sharepoint and the tools associated with this powerful and complex system.