News

Two More Microsoft BI Accelerators Hit

• By Scott Bekker
• 06/02/2004

The tools are called the Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator and the Microsoft Office Excel Add-in for SQL Server Analysis Services.

By developing free toolkits like the BI Accelerators that run on top of other Microsoft products, Microsoft aims to deepen the commitment existing customers make with their current products, cross-sell related products to other customers and spur business for partners and system integrators.

The scorecards accelerator is based on the key performance metric paradigm that was hot a few years ago. The idea is to automate the process of collecting and exposing business metrics on a constant basis to give executives and other decision-makers real-time access to company performance data.

The scorecards accelerator is Web-based and relies primarily on the Web Parts technology in SharePoint Portal Server for presenting the polished data on company intranets. Other Microsoft technologies that can be leveraged by the scorecards accelerator include SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services, Visio and InfoPath.

The Excel add-in allows business users to access and analyze live multi-dimensional data in SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services from the familiar interface of Excel 2002 or Excel 2003. The toolkit also provides technology to help those users create customized reports.

More information about the scorecards toolkit is available here. Information on the Excel-SQL toolkit is available here.