Applied Microsoft Business Intelligence shows you how to leverage the complete set of Microsoft tools-including Microsoft Office and SQL Server-to better analyze business data.

This book provides best practices for building complete BI solutions using the full Microsoft toolset. You will learn how to effectively use SQL Server Analysis and Reporting Services, along with Excel, SharePoint, and other tools to provide effective and cohesive solutions for the enterprise. Coverage includes BI architecture, data queries, semantic models, multidimensional modeling, data analysis and visualization, performance monitoring, data mining, and more, to help you learn to perform practical business analysis and reporting. Written by an author team that includes a key member of the BI product team at Microsoft, this useful reference provides expert instruction for more effective use of the Microsoft BI toolset.

• Use Microsoft BI suite cohesively for more effective enterprise solutions
• Search, analyze, and visualize data more efficiently and completely
• Develop flexible and scalable tabular and multidimensional models

Monitor performance, build a BI portal, and deploy and manage the BI Solution

Leverage the power of SQL and Office to build a complete enterprise BI solution

The business intelligence world is changing. Hardware is getting more powerful, platforms are getting more capable, and decision timeframes are getting shorter. Microsoft's SQL Server and Office products provide powerful core BI technologies that allow decision makers who rely on Office for basic analytics to tap into a sophisticated BI toolset for both analysis and reporting. Applied Microsoft Business Intelligence reveals the best practices for building complete BI solutions using SQL Server, Reporting, and Analysis Services along with Excel and SharePoint for a more robust business intelligence framework.

This book shows you how to use the Microsoft business intelligence building blocks to construct synergetic and complete solutions to suit any organization. Organized chronologically by implementation order, it guides you through the data layer, data transformation and quality, the semantic layer, and the presentation layer, and ties it all together with comprehensive case studies. Focusing on best practices rather than specific tools keeps your skills relevant beyond the 2014 SQL release. Comprehensive explanations including architecture, strengths and weaknesses, and practical applications bring you fully up to speed quickly.

Applied Microsoft Business Intelligence shows you how to:

• Design an effective BI architecture that best fits your organization
• Develop flexible, scalable, tabular and multi-dimensional models
• Create interactive visualizations with Power View
• Explore geographic and temporal data with Power Map
• Implement self-service delivery and an efficient deployment strategy
• Manage, maintain, and scale the BI environment