Chapter 1. Introduction
Business Intelligence (BI) describes the ability to jointly analyze all of a company's data, distilling relevant information to be used to foster better business decisions. The foundation of any BI solution is the careful preprocessing of existing data, for example, in a data warehouse.
ReportServer acts as the gateway between end-users and the collected data, allowing users to efficiently access and analyze the available data. From camera-ready evaluations to fine-grained ad-hoc reporting; ReportServer provides you with the tools to support your daily work.
In this manual we will discuss ReportServer from an end-users point-of-view. We will show how to display and export pre-built reports also as the the creation of complex analyses.
This manual is structured into the following chapters:
This section gives a quick introduction to ReportServer. We will cover the basic workings of the user interface and explain how to execute reports and export them to various formats.
The TeamSpace is your personal workspace in ReportServer. This chapter explains the intricacies of using and configuring the TeamSpace.
ReportServer unifies different kinds of reports in one system. This section introduces the various report formats, describes their specific characteristics and explains common concepts.
ReportServer's dashboard provides quick access your most important reports. In this chapter we describe how dashboards can be created an configured.
ReportServer provides an easy-to-use yet powerful tool to create ad-hoc reports: the dynamic list. In this chapter we present the dynamic list starting from the basics such as selecting and filtering of data and continuing to more advanced topics such as aggregation, advanced filtering, the use of computed fields or templating.
The Pivot mode of the dynamic list provides a different means to explore the data from your dynamic list reports by loading them into a cross table. In this section we describe how to prepare you report to use the Pivot Mode.
The Pivot mode and OLAP reports share the same analysis component which is discussed in this chapter. We will show how to create cross tables and charts from your data.
ReportServer allows to create schedules for executing reports and exporting the result, for example, directly to your email account. In this chapter we introduce the scheduling feature and explain the various configuration options.
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