Book Image

Discovering Business Intelligence using MicroStrategy 9

Book Image

Discovering Business Intelligence using MicroStrategy 9

Overview of this book

Business Intelligence is a type of technology that has been proven to support business decisions in an organization. MicroStrategy 9 is a fully-integrated BI platform that makes Business Intelligence faster, easier, and more user-friendly. It enables businesses to generate their own reports and dashboards without the need for technical knowledge.This practical, hands-on guide will provide Business Intelligence for executives, as well as enable BI reports and dashboards without the dependency of IT savvy personnel. It will allow you to design, build, and share business relevant data in hours, in a secure way, including mobile devices and show you how to leverage your transactional information.This example-oriented book looks at the value proposition of cloud computing and the MicroStrategy platform, and features practical exercises for BI reports and dashboard enablement, including the design phase and best practices for when we design a BI report.The book begins with an exploration of MicroStrategy along with typical business needs. Our focus then shifts to best practices for BI reports and dashboard definitions from the functional stand point, with easy-to-do exercises that will allow you to enable the reports in the platform. You will learn about scorecards and dashboards, along with sharing the reports. Next, you will get acquainted with cloud-based services provided by the MicroStrategy platform. By the end of this book, you will able to design, enable, and share BI reports and dashboards without the need for comprehensive technical knowledge, and leverage the latest technology on the market.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

The MicroStrategy Cloud portfolio


MicroStrategy offers three different versions of its platform in the Cloud, such as personal, express, and platform. They share the same concept of do-it-yourself schema and strong visualization capabilities, but with some extensions on the express and platform versions.

Personal

This is the entry version of the offer provided by the MicroStrategy Cloud; it is easy to use within minutes and you are able to load data from your Excel files, generate a model, design reports, scorecards and/or dashboards, and share it all with your colleagues and customers. It is intended for only one person in the design and construction role.

This version is ideal for entrepreneurs, journalists, managers, professors, and anyone who needs to analyze data and communicate with their audience. Also, it gives 100 percent self-service and leverages the do-it-yourself approach.

You probably rely on spreadsheets to analyze and share data, as we already discussed. Almost everyone does...