SharePoint360 Is Selected for Business Intelligence Early Adoption Program

While early adoption programs span many technologies and generally only engage Microsoft customers, SharePoint360 was selected as a result of its work in highlighting Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 within Microsoft SharePoint Server. The company was chosen for its proposed budgeting project for customer Gafcon, bridging the gap between information inside and outside the firewall.

In preliminary work with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, SharePoint360 notes this update strengthens Microsoft BI in many ways, now aligning it with larger BI providers' offerings, ensuring that BI is accessible to information workers who are not BI software analysts. Coupled with Office 2010, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2's advanced BI functionality is complimented by SharePoint's collaboration capabilities, fostering collaboration around BI data. Main updates to the product include:

--  Improved business applications integration -- Business Data Catalog,
    now called Business Connectivity Services, has been enhanced from read-only
    to now support bi-directional create, read, update, delete, search and
    offline access to line-of-business (LOB) data

--  End-user cube creation -- SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel (formerly
    codenamed project "Gemini") and SharePoint empowers end users to create and
    edit their own online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes with potentially
    millions of rows of data using new in memory architecture and compression
    technology

--  Data visualization -- Incorporates enhanced Excel 2010 interactive
    reporting including advanced slicers for visually filtering report data,
    sparklines, heatmaps and much more in real-time
    

"Given the extensive work we have completed for our customers with SharePoint BI, we are pleased to be a part of this exclusive program and have the opportunity to work directly with Microsoft on the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 release," said Jenifer Underwood, BI solution lead at SharePoint360. "As a company, we fully support Microsoft's vision of empowering front line information workers with the ability to quickly and easily analyze the right information at the right time to make informed decisions."

For more information about SharePoint360's services, please visit: http://www.sharepoint360.com.

About SharePoint360

Headquartered in San Diego, SharePoint360, LLC is a leading SharePoint consulting, hosting and business intelligence solutions provider. Founded in 2006, the company is a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner, whose team of software industry expert have completed have completed a variety of collaborative technology implementations for Fortune 500 Companies, small businesses and government agencies in the U.S. and internationally. More information about SharePoint360 is available at http://www.sharepoint360.com.