I'm in a position of evaluating products / approaches to build Business Intelligence Dashboards on top of Sharepoint WSS (no MOSS at this stage). Does anyone have any suggestions where would be a good place to start?
The BI platform is currently built on SQL Server 2005 / SSIS / SSRS and we're currently investigating adding SSAS to the mix so we're very Microsoft centric at the moment.
Thanks,
Steve
Perhaps this article on how to build dashboards with SSRS/Sharepoint: Building a Dashboard in SQL Server Reporting Services.
In my experience building a dashoard with SSRS/SharePoint is mostly a function of the quality of the talent involved, not the tools. SSRS and Sharepoint are both quircky, but they can get the job done out-of-the-box.
We succesfully built a WSS based BI tool for our product. The biggest challenge for us was to get delegation of security to pass through from the browser to WSS to SSAS to utilise SSAS role security to make sure the one client could'nt possibly see another's.
I'd agree with the previous comment about quirckyness; we have had to develop a fair amount of technique / supporting code for things like casading parameters behaviour's in the report viewer etc.
Best of luck - it does work if you stick with it; our customers love the portal and it will get better with the advances in Sharepoint foundation 2010.
There is a company in Chicago ( DMC - www.dmcinfo.com/sharepoint ) who has SharePoint Dashboard solution that integrates with a variety of data sources (e.g. Dynamics, CRM, Goldmine, QuickBooks, SharePoint Lists, etc.). It works with both WSS (free SharePoint) and MOSS (premium SharePoint). You may want to try asking them.
