Excel Business Intelligence - Front-Ends

A frequent criticism of the past, was the media break between Excel as a BI front-end and web applications. In earlier versions, these were two completely parallel worlds, users have either created reports and analysis in Excel or Reporting Services when the Web was one of the core capability requirements. An integrated Excel / Web environment was achieved earlier only by the use of third-party.

This has changed with the "Excel Services", which are licensed as part of Sharepoint and Excel 2007. These offer the opportunity to create business intelligence reports directly from Excel and can be transported with a few clicks in Web environments. The BI features like drill-down or filtering capabilities are maintained, even if the opportunities today still limited. One still missing functionality is the input data in Analysis Services, these are still not today for web-based planning tasks. An essential role of the Excel Services today if you want to set up the Reporting Services provides an enterprise-wide reporting solution, which will also update end users from departments such as finance, controlling and sales reports without IT assistance. Excel Services help you to save reports directly in this format. Microsoft extends the capabilities to model from Excel and build web applications, code-named "Project Gemini" drastically.

In addition to the Microsoft's offer is a wide range of front-end solutions from third-party suppliers. These are divided into general BI front-ends that support different databases, and optimized for the Microsoft platform providers such as special XLCubed. In principle, supporting Microsoft professionals a deeper integration with the Microsoft BI world.

The Third Party Products offer some additional functionality to Microsoft's offer (Bissantz with additional pre-configured analytic skills) or are in competition with Microsoft's own offering. It is a great strength of the platform to support a wide range of third-party products to provide solutions for different requirements. The interface to Microsoft Analysis Services is highly mature and enjoys great popularity, there are only a handful of BI front-end providers that are not at least have an interface to the Microsoft world.