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SharePoint 2.0 OLAP Web Parts

There is now tremendous out-of-the-box OLAP reporting capability on the Microsoft platform. I want to deviate for the moment from the strict XML/A topic to discuss some of these capabilities.

SharePoint 2.0

What can I say - I'm hooked. With SharePoint 2.0 on Windows 2003, you can create shared work areas and portals for your users. You setup the base framework and Web Parts (see below) and security - and then let your users go at it. Users can create their own personal portals or customize shared portals. These portals can combine application sections, collaboration sections, and third party information tools.

SharePoint is a big leap for developers such as myself, who are accustomed to building a web application from scratch as a monolithic whole. I now need to dispose of that mentality (at least sometimes) and think instead about what pieces I need to add to an existing SharePoint ecosphere. But of course before adding pieces you have to know what pieces already exists. So here is a quick rundown of what I've found.

Web Parts are central to SharePoint. A Web Part occupies a section of a SharePoint document (Web Part Page). The user can select parts to be displayed and configure their properties. Parts can talk to each other as data providers or consumers. So a list part may be connected to a detail part on the same page. Parts can be closed (temporarily removed from page) or closed (only title area of part is visible).

Out-of-the box OLAP parts

Office Web Parts

Microsoft's Office Web Parts and Components is a collection of Web Parts and data retrieval services that can be used to include interactive Excel pivot tables, pivot charts, and spreadsheets in a SharePoint 2.0 portal. The PivotChart and PivotTable parts are based on the ones you are probably familiar with, but have some added SharePoint-specific capabilities. The web parts may be connected to a variety of data sources, including SQL Server databases, OLAP cubes, SharePoint lists, other Office Web Parts, or any other data source with an available OLE DB provider. The Web Parts are based on familiar Excel components and support a large subset of Excel's features.

Scorecard Parts

The Microsoft Business Scorecard Accelerator (MBSA) comes with a number of nice part for use in OLAP applications. This makes sense as the MBSA is built upon SSAS cubes for their datasources. The parts included are Dimension Slicer, Scorecard Standard View, Scorecard Custom View, Scorecard Single View, Strategy Map View and Dynamic Gauge View.

I especially like the Dimension Slicer. It is a provider part which provides one or more dimension members as slicers to the other Scorecard parts - or to your own custom part.

The Scorecard Custom View is also a nice addition to your OLAP part palette. It is similar to the PivotTable view, but with the additional capability of displaying graphical indicators of KPIs.

The figure below shows Office Parts and Scorecard Parts together in one SharePoint document.

Scorecard Sample

Generic SharePoint Collaboration and Workflow Parts

Quite a lot of useful stuff in this category including:

Announcements
Contacts
Members
Tasks
Events
Discussion
Link lists

Information parts include:

MSNBC Business
News
Stocks
Sports
Weather

Generic parts include:

Web Capture
XML transformation

Microsoft is also fostering a community of 3rd party ISVs to write special purpose web parts or larger application blocks in a SharePoint compatible form.

Getting on board with SharePoint like I said requires an up front investment (time, emotional, financial), but it has significant payback potential. Compared to email and filesystem based collaboration, SharePoint is just years ahead. And compared to building single-purpose, monolithic applications, it is years ahead for us developers.