Built upon SQL Server 2005 and delivered through Office SharePoint Server and Excel 2007, Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007 is a Business Intelligence application that puts business critical information in the hands of users to monitor, analyse and plan.

Using the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform, PerformancePoint Server 2007 can help you build an enterprise-grade, scalable performance management application. Using SQL Server 2005 for data integration; an analytical data model that includes a calculation engine and data mining; and a highly flexible and scalable reporting platform to broadcast information to a wide audience. All of this is delivered via the Web in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, providing everyone with a central place to get their business intelligence information.

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Microsoft Reporting Services provides an integrated, end-to-end set of tools for creating, managing, and delivering reports. It includes a scalable engine, for server-based hosting and processing of reports. You have the option of delivering the reports across the organization as HTML/PDF/Excel formats from a central server, or integrated them into your windows applications. Report delivery can also be scheduled, and sent via email. Best of all, Reporting Services is a value-add that comes free with your license of SQL Server.

The SSW team has been writing custom reports since the very first version of Reporting Services in SQL 2000. Since then, our feedback to Microsoft has driven many new features introduced in the SQL 2005 version.

Watch SSW's Chief Architect Adam Cogan presenting Reporting Services tutorials in a special video training session on DotNetRocks TV.

View sample Reporting Services reports.

SQL Report Builder is a tool that comes free with SQL Server 2005, and allows your non-technical users to easily create simple reports. The user interface is intuitive and familiar to anyone who has created reports in MS Access. SSW Consulting can help you identify where best use the Report Builder in your organization. We can help you set up the environment, and train your users in effective report creation.

Crystal Reports has been the premier reporting solution for many years, and is only now starting to be replaced by Microsoft Reporting Services. SSW has plenty of experience with custom crystal reports solutions, and can provide any level of assistance for your projects.

Microsoft Access has a simple report creation feature. These reports can be driven from an access or SQL Server backend. Generally SSW recommends migrating these to Reporting Services, however we have also implemented a product to bring some of the advantages of SQL Reporting Services to Access. SSW Access Reporter allows organisations to publish Access reports over the web, where previously they could only be displayed on the local computer.

Excel 2007 features powerful and easy to use tools to create reports from your OLAP cubes and relational data. This includes slicing and dicing, filtering and sorting.

Additionally, with Sharepoint 2007's Excel Services, you can now publish your excel spreadsheets on the web, allowing non-technical people such as BA's and accountants to create and deploy meaningful reports.

XSL FO is a document engine based on XML data and XSL stylesheets to render the data. This allows for a very flexible document engine that is more adept at producing documents rather than reports. This is a limitation that some of the other reporting technologies, mentioned on this page, struggle to deal with. The other technologies are very good at creating reports but not so good at creating a document.

For example, if you wanted to produce a document where you have a list of questions and you want to show two questions per page listing the questions horizontally, it is very difficult to do in reporting services and other reporting engines, but easy to do in XML FO.

Sample XSL FO Report