The Microsoft Dynamics AX product strategy for Reporting and BI

Microsoft is firmly committed to investing in building and enriching its BI platform technologies and products.


The primary goal of these investments is to fully realize the “BI for the masses” vision by delivering functionally comprehensive and low TCO BI platforms and applications to permeate the benefits of BI across all levels of users in an organization.  Figure 1 shows this vision.

Figure 1: The Microsoft Business Intelligence Vision

The Microsoft BI Stack contains an integrated suite of platform products, technologies, and applications that can be used to implement, deploy, manage, and use rich Business Performance Management features to address the core scenarios listed in the Executive Summary section.

Figure 2 provides an overview of the platform products, technologies, and applications that form the current Microsoft BI stack. The stack consists of the following components:

Data Platforms: Core relational (SQL Server) and Multi dimensional (SQL Server Analysis Services) database engines to facilitate the storage and retrieval of data for Reporting and Analysis.

Data Integration Services: Platform services (SQL Server Integration Services) to support the extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) of data from multiple homogeneous and/or heterogeneous data sources to facilitate consolidated Reporting and Analysis. A Reporting Platform (SQL Server Reporting Services) that consists of services and tools to enable designing, deploying, integrating, and managing reports required to address information analysis requirements. Rich Ad Hoc End-User Reporting and Analysis tools (Microsoft® Office Excel® and SQL report Builder) to facilitate self-service reporting and analysis.

· A Scorecarding, Analytics, and Forecasting/Planning platform (Microsoft® Office PerformancePoint™ Server 2007)

A Portals and Collaboration platform (Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007) to enable Web portals to present, access, and share information.

Figure 2: The Microsoft BI Stack

Microsoft is committed to enhancing the BI stack and enabling richer scenarios in future releases of the platforms and applications.

The product strategy for Reporting and BI in Microsoft Dynamics AX is to integrate tightly with, and take advantage of, the richness, capabilities, and enhancements to the Microsoft BI Stack. Many significant steps have been taken in this direction in the latest release of Microsoft Dynamics AX (Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0), and there is more to come in the future releases. The following sections in this paper on the Business Performance Management features in Microsoft Dynamics AX will highlight the integration points in the current release and summarize related future directions.

Note: This paper will not describe the implementation architecture and details of the products and technologies in the Microsoft BI Stack. The paper will assume general reader familiarity with the Microsoft BI Stack, and will only focus on the related integration points in Microsoft Dynamics AX.

http://www.pargesoft.com/ Microsoft Dynamics AX Global Partner