![Bb735122.image001(en-us,TechNet.10)[1]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/shishirs/WindowsLiveWriter/CentralizingandSharingBusinessIntelligen_A2BF/Bb735122.image001(en-us,TechNet.10)%5B1%5D_3.jpg "Bb735122.image001(en-us,TechNet.10)[1]")
This technical white paper features the Microsoft CBI (Consolidated Business Intelligence) portal as the context to discuss how Microsoft IT uses Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Microsoft business intelligence products to help business units within Microsoft to make better and faster decisions. Although Microsoft CBI is an internal Microsoft solution, the underlying technologies and products are publicly available to customers who seek to achieve similar results. These results include improving business insight, accelerating shared business processes, and connecting people with business-critical information in one central location through a standardized user interface that is customizable according to personal preferences.
The Microsoft CBI portal gives Microsoft employees and decision makers a single, personalized location with one enterprise report catalog to access standard and ad hoc reports, scorecards, and other business intelligence components. The Microsoft CBI portal enables business units within Microsoft to streamline reporting and decision-making processes as well as share business intelligence across the company in a more secure and efficient way. Additionally, it enables close collaboration with business partners and vendors that work with Microsoft on strategic and business-critical projects worldwide.
Download the technical Whitepaper at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb735122.aspx
Excellent demo of a fully Hosted Customer Interaction Management Platform from Clarity Consulting: http://connect.claritycon.com/
In today's competitive global market, businesses need technology that cost-effectively enables flexibility and adds value to their organization.
Business Productivity Online Standard Suite delivers hosted communication and collaboration tools that feature:
- High availability
- Comprehensive security
- Simplified IT management
I noticed an interesting Webinar scheduled for October 28th on migrating from your Notes environment to hosted solutions using Microsoft Online Services. The webinar is organized by Cloud Strategies LLC and Binary Tree.
CLICK HERE TO SEE DETAILS AND REGISTER
![overview_HowItWorks[1]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/shishirs/WindowsLiveWriter/MovingfromNotestoMicrosoftOnline_B034/overview_HowItWorks%5B1%5D_3.jpg "overview_HowItWorks[1]")
Microsoft Online Services provides dedicated, enterprise-level hosted solutions for e-mail, collaboration, instant messaging and Web conferencing. Services are delivered from a highly reliable network of Microsoft data centers on servers systems dedicated to individual customer—enabling customers to use the latest productivity applications while reducing IT overhead.
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard Compliance Planning Guide version 1.2 is targeted for merchants that accept payment cards, financial institutions that process payment card transactions, and service providers—third-party companies that provide payment card processing or data storage services. IT solutions for each of these groups must meet all PCI DSS requirements. The guide is intended to augment the IT Compliance Management Guide, which introduces a framework-based approach to creating IT controls as part of your efforts to comply with multiple regulations and standards. This guide also describes Microsoft products and technology solutions that you can use to implement a series of IT controls to help meet PCI DSS requirements, and many other regulatory obligations.
DOWNLOAD THE GUIDE
The National Retail Federation (NRF) is the world's largest retail trade association with membership that comprises all retail formats and channels of distribution. NRF 2010 is the most influential retailer event of the year. This high profile, in-depth industry focused event run by the largest retail trade association is where retailers send their decision makers for the excellent content provided in the sessions and the opportunity to see the latest technology on the show floor.
Results
![R2_SSBI[1]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/shishirs/WindowsLiveWriter/SelfServiceBIinRetail_C732/R2_SSBI%5B1%5D_3.jpg "R2_SSBI[1]")
I've been in several meetings with retailers where business users and IT have been at odds with each other over business intelligence and reporting. At many of the retailers, I have noticed that business groups tend to own a large part of the Business Intelligence Applications and IT has very little control over it. A healthy balance is when IT has governance and control over the environment and at the same time, the business groups have the ability to generate their own content and reporting. This is where managed self service BI comes in.
SQL Server 2008 R2 is the next generation of the Microsoft SQL Server database platform, planned for release in the first half of calendar year 2010. Self-Service BI is one of the capabilities in the new release. SQL Server 2008 R2 provides both end-users and IT with powerful tools to create, analyze and model, share and manage business intelligence data in a secure and streamlined way.
Self-service analysis tools allow end-users to quickly create solutions from disparate data sources within a familiar Microsoft Office Excel user interface. By publishing these solutions in SharePoint Server, users can easily share them with others. IT gains management and oversight so they can help ensure the reliability, performance, and security of data-driven assets across the enterprise while also gaining better visibility into how people are using their data.
These new tools will empower retailers to extend the benefits of BI across the company with minimal dependence on IT to help drive smarter, quicker decision-making, free up IT staff for more valuable activities, and dramatically drive down deployment costs.
The merchandizing planners pull together budget for the year based on data from the previous year or season. They can access the historic data from their reporting databases but are often challenged with analyzing the data against trends and demographic information obtained from third party sources(possibly in an Excel Spreadsheet). Using traditional BI systems, this can be a challenge that requires the merchandizing planners to work with IT to help integrate the third party data into the reporting system. With Project Gemini, the merchandizing Planners are empowered with self-service analysis capabilities. The in-memory BI capabilities deployed as an add-in for Excel enables merchandizing managers to quickly analyze data and gain new insights into customer behavior and trends.
In the merchandize planning process, buyers, category and department managers need to make decisions and plans around what merchandize to sell at what store on a week by week basis. At the same time they also have to meet the target set in the budget. Events, Promotions and other external factors have an impact on these decisions and they need additional data to help get better insights during this process. Self-service analytical applications can empower people to make quicker and better decisions without having to involve IT. Excel Data-Mining Add ins enable users to access the powerful analytics engine from SQL Server to quickly analyze information to assist in pricing, allocation of inventory to stores and space allotted to each item in each stores display.
Retailers can benefit in streamlining and improving the demand planning processes around campaigns, promotions, reconciling the demand forecast, including seasonal and regional variations, product introductions and retirements, and planned promotional activity with the supply plan using self-service BI. Microsoft’s BI solution spans Microsoft Office Excel and other Office applications for individual BI, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server for team BI and Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server for organizationwide BI, with SQL Server as the data platform. This seamlessly interoperable, end-to-end lineup uniquely positions the retailer to deliver on the promise of ubiquitous BI by offering organizations compelling benefits designed to include these:
- Lower TCO. Ability to utilize existing investments in SQL Server, SharePoint and Office and drive end-user adoption to dramatically bring down per-user costs and generate unprecedented economies
- Rapid deployment and faster time-to-benefits. Easy onramp to powerful BI capabilities embedded within the everyday productivity tools employees already use, promoting wide end-user adoption
- Freeing up IT to act as a true strategic differentiator. Empowering information workers to quickly access information and perform their own analysis with minimal hand-holding from IT enables IT staff to concentrate their efforts where they can have the most strategic value for the business.
- Powerful synergies with other Microsoft applications. Ability to deploy the unified communications capabilities within Office Communications Server, for example, to nimbly act on BI-generated insights and “spread the wealth” with co-workers, customers, partners and suppliers
Look for my article on how retailers can leverage social media on page 41. I would love any feedback, thoughts or potential collaboration on other articles that I am working on around social media and retail.
![banner3[1]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/shishirs/WindowsLiveWriter/MicrosoftInfosysCollaborativeSupplyChain_87D6/banner3%5B1%5D_3.jpg "banner3[1]")
The Infosys-Microsoft Supply Chain Center of Excellence aims to build an active community of supply chain decision makers, professionals and experts. The Center envisions a forum where the community shares supply chain trends, issues, and ideas. Engage with Infosys and Microsoft experts and industry thought leaders to leverage their business process expertise and technology capabilities for insights and ideas on supply chain issues.
Check out the Microsoft-Infosys Supply Chain Solutions at : http://www.nextgenerationsupplychains.com/
Jamba Juice—a leading provider of healthy, on-the-go food and beverages—viewed the economic slowdown as an opportunity to assess its operations and improve efficiencies. The company decided to invest in integrated technology tools that would help its stores run more efficiently and streamline communication. Therefore, Jamba Juice signed a Microsoft® Enterprise Client Access License Suite agreement, saving 50 percent in software costs, and deployed products such as Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and Microsoft Office PerformancePoint® Server 2007. The company already has seen improvements in its productivity, and it expects to enhance its business intelligence capabilities for better decision making. Overall, Jamba Juice anticipates that its use of Microsoft products will result in increased profitability due to a better ability to serve customers and decreased operational costs.
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New Belgium Brewing, one of the most innovative and fastest-growing craft brewers in the United States, has long used information technology to help meet its commitments to environmental stewardship, employee empowerment, and the bottom line. To help keep a close eye on inventory sales and costs, New Belgium has extended the reach of its Microsoft Dynamics® GP business management solution and has incorporated Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to increase access to information and enhance communication and collaboration across the company. New Belgium credits its information technology solutions with helping it manage sustainable growth as it expands into new markets and introduces new products
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With over 5,500 employees at its corporate head office and 475 retail outlets nationwide, Canadian Tire was looking to refresh its Intranet site known as inTIREnet. The pre-existing site, hosted on a Lotus platform, was visually cluttered and staff complained of poor search functions. Canadian Tire teamed up with Microsoft® technology partner Envision IT to move its entire Intranet to a SharePoint® collaboration and document-management platform. Now, employees using the SharePoint-supported Intranet can easily search documents and share information across the network and receive daily corporate news updates. The solution helps Canadian Tire extend communication between employees in the corporate office, also known as the Home Office, while offering greater security measures and access to internal documents.
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The Case Studies website is at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/ and is a great source for stories on how organizations solved challenging situations using Microsoft technology. Filtering on Retail Industry enables you to have a look at Retail Industry stories. The site also supports RSS and here is a link to the RSS feed for Retail Case Studies around Business Insight:
![thumbnail[2]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/shishirs/WindowsLiveWriter/SubscribetotheRSSFeedforRetailCaseStudie_BDDB/thumbnail%5B2%5D_3.jpg "thumbnail[2]")
This is an excellent whitepaper for understanding the challenges and solution for Supply Chain Collaboration as implemented by the Entertainment and Devices (EDD) division in Microsoft. EDD leverages a complex supply chain of over 300 partners, suppliers, and distributors. Supporting the EDD business model requires a secure, easy, and scalable infrastructure to collaborate with multiple companies. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides the technology platform for EDD’s global supply network. The platform incorporates Business Intelligence solutions, workflows, and support for legacy solutions. It enables accurate decision making based on timely and trustworthy information, and supports seamless collaboration with business partners. Standardization and the reuse of existing information technology investments reduce complexity.
![Ee156484.image003(en-us,TechNet.10)[1]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/shishirs/WindowsLiveWriter/TechnicalCaseStudySupplyChainManagementP_DDFB/Ee156484.image003(en-us,TechNet.10)%5B1%5D_thumb.jpg "Ee156484.image003(en-us,TechNet.10)[1]")
The fig above illustrates how EDD integrates its SharePoint environment with important enterprise applications, such as the ERP system, the company's sales system (MS Sales), and the central customer relationship management (CRM) system. In most areas, EDD uses service-oriented architectures based on Web services for interoperability. The Web services provide direct connectivity or encapsulate further components within the communication channel, such as Windows® Communication Foundation (WCF) services for communication across security boundaries. Business Data Catalog also includes a direct Microsoft SQL Server® database connection based on ADO.NET to the company's most important data warehouse.
![Ee156484.image006(en-us,TechNet.10)[2]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/shishirs/WindowsLiveWriter/TechnicalCaseStudySupplyChainManagementP_DDFB/Ee156484.image006(en-us,TechNet.10)%5B2%5D_thumb.jpg "Ee156484.image006(en-us,TechNet.10)[2]")
The figure above shows the claims-based authentication and authorization architecture that EDD recently implemented to support external access based on a Windows Live™ ID. This architecture eliminates the need for extranet accounts while EDD employees can continue to use their corporate accounts to access SharePoint resources. To authorize authenticated users, EDD developed a custom Security Token Service (STS) based on the "Geneva" Framework. The STS generates claims (that is, security tokens) based on CRM attributes. A CRM authorization provider then processes these Windows Live ID tokens and CRM tokens and grants permissions similar to SharePoint roles. This claims-based authentication and authorization architecture is extensible. It can support additional claims from trusted partners in the future, such as from partners running "Geneva" Server as their Windows-based STS provider.
Click Here for Technical Case Study
