Microsoft Announces Business Intelligence App

Following the trend in the software industry toward developing business intelligence capabilities that are accessible throughout an organization, Microsoft announced on March 15 its namesake Business Intelligence Optimization application.

The BIO for Microsoft Dynamics SL (otherwise known as Solomon) provides users with role-based, personalized (though to what degree its not certain) scorecards to help ascertain business performance, according to Microsoft officials.

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What that means in a nutshell is users throughout a company have the capability, based on their role within a company, to perform strategic, operational and financial analytics using BIO.

The BIO release is part of Microsofts overall roadmap to release 60 different "perspectives," across 14 common roles, for analyzing data.

Reports generated can be accessed and viewed either through common Microsoft Office applications—Office, Excel, SharePoint Services, Office Business Scorecard Manager—or through BIO itself.

Microsoft didnt do all the work on its own. It worked with NexVue Analytics Corp., a channel partner that develops and implements business intelligence applications, to co-develop BIO.

The application runs about $3,600 for two users, and will be available in June.

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