What is Microsoft Reporting Services?
According to research, the staff employed in the area of information management spend far too much time collecting information (perhaps up to 80%) and not enough time in analysing it and making decisions based upon their analysis. Also, in many organisations, such information collecting and analysis consumes vast amounts of IT resources, which in itself places a strain on the organisation. In many cases Excel spreadsheets remain the only real reporting tool and this often leads to inaccurate data and hence the wrong decisions being made.
Microsoft created Reporting Services being based on their well respected SQL server offering. Their aim to "enable employees at all levels of an organisation to realise the promise of Business Intelligence to promote better decision making".
Reporting Services and Enterprise Reporting
There are today numerous terms and acronyms surrounding the subject of Business Intelligence (BI)on a daily basis.Terms like Enterprise Reporting, OLAP (Online Analytical Processing), Decision Support Systems (DSS), Dashboards and the like.
However, in real terms the purpose is to "get out" what was "put in" in such a way as to help an organisation better understand where it is and how it can reach its goals. In other words "reporting" whilst being vital actually represents the last (and perhaps the most important) stage of the "IT pipeline".
Why Does Your Organisation Need Reporting Services?
It is plain to see that any report data is useless unless it is going to be seen by the right people, therefore creation and distribution of reports are a vital part of the process. There are however other issues, so to demonstrate why your organisation needs MS Reporting Services (RS), let's analyse the problems in the reporting arena and see how Reporting Services overcomes them.
- Report Authoring is Labour Intensive
Reporting Services, with its Report Designer allows reports to be created with speed.
- Centralised Report Management is Required
With Reporting Services you can save all your reports in one "report repository".
- Reports Need to be Sent to Many Locations
Reporting Services supports both on-demand and subscription based reporting.
- Differing Electronic Formats
Reporting Services supports a large range of formats as standard.
- Current Systems do not allow Reports to be Extended
With Reporting Services you can extend its basic capabilities with custom code.
- Secure Reports Needed
Reporting Service's inbuilt security systems allows administrators to set different levels of security to all users, therefore only letting people see what they are allowed to see.
- Cost
Reporting Services is bundled with SQL server, which means you can run Reporting Services on the same server without additional cost.
As you can see, Reporting Services covers all the needs of a reporting system and need not cost your organisation one penny to operate.
However, even though great steps have been made to make it easy to install and use, your company may well benefit from help, and Contemporary with all our years of experience and knowledge in this field, can make sure that your organisation gets the very best out of its data.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is the difference between data and information?
A: Data can mean a lot of things to people but we are all guilty of walking into meetings with spreadsheets of data that is really just numbers and doesn’t mean that much to people that haven’t written them. What we are looking at with information, is making it available in a format that is instantly readable and relevant to the individual person that is looking at that information. And the other side of it is that it might not be just numbers or numerical figures, it may be that information around the business; documents knowledge and other information that we may want to look at and that’s business intelligence.
Q: Who is Enterprise Reporting relevant to?
A: Enterprise reporting is relevant to two communities within an organisation; the first community is obviously the people who need to get the reports and rely on them, also there is the IT community. It’s in the IT department’s interest to control and manage the distribution of information throughout the organisation so really it is key to two different areas. |
