Microsoft reporting services

Some time ago when I was working at a previous employee I was part of a team who was evaluating some business intelligence solutions. One of the systems we where evaluating was Microsoft reporting services, to get a good understanding of the system I did some trials, installed the system on a test server and played around with it. Also I have printed a lot of documentation to get a good read about things.

Now cleaning up my office, I am working on that project already for a long time, I (re)found those prints and to make sure I can find them back and give you the change to also find them online in case you are looking at Microsoft reporting services I have decided to post a little explanation about them and some links.

The first paper is about Phillip Morris International and a BI implementation from Microsoft.:

"With 40,000 employees servicing markets in more than 160 countries around the world, PMI is continually monitoring a complex array of business data to drive its ongoing success. To continue its leadership in a rapidly changing global market, PMI’s corporate executives and worldwide market managers needed a solution to speed and improve access to consistent sales data across the global organization. They wanted to more quickly access business performance data at the corporate level, and to implement a consistent method for reporting and analyzing information across many different local markets and product brands."

The second paper is about "Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing in SQL server 2005" and is discussing the possibilities of sql server 2005 and BI solutions. They also provide some coding examples and it is generally a good introduction paper to this subject.

The third paper is from Progressive Strategies and is named "Comparing Business Intelligence Platfroms". A short introduction to the paper:

"This white paper compares the features of Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Analysis Services, IBM DB2 OLAP Server 8.1, and Hyperion Essbase 6.5. As you'll learn, Analysis Services has functionality that compares favorably against other offerings such as IBM DB2 OLAP Server 8.1 and Hyperion Essbase 6.5. SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services and Hyperion Essbase 6.5 lead the industry in online analytical processing (OLAP), according to The OLAP Report (www.olapreport.com), and Microsoft has taken a clear lead in the marketplace over Hyperion and the other vendors (Figure 1 OLAP Market Share Page 2). According to The OLAP Report, this lead is sure to increase in 2003. Customers1 such as MGM Mirage, Starbucks Coffee, and Comp USA have adopted Analysis Services to gain competitive advantages in their respective businesses. Numerous independent software vendors (ISVs), including Ascential Software, Brio Software, Cognos, ProClarity Corporation, Sagent Technology, and Business Objects, have implemented solutions on Analysis Services. It is a more modern, flexible, scalable, and usable OLAP database than Essbase or DB2."

From my short experience with reporting services I have to say that it is a real good product from Microsoft and that I really like working with it. I have plans to start gaining some more knowledge on this platform an will report about it on this weblog even do it is not Oracle or UNIX/Linux related :-)