Who

The client is one of Australia’s leading universities with multiple campuses, almost 40,000 students and more than 1,200 academic staff.

Why

The University had embarked on a program to establish a Business Intelligence (BI) platform designed to enable strategic and operational performance reporting across all University functional areas.

A number of key issues needed to be addresses including the increasing volume of emails, limitations of static reporting and the lack of analytical tools available.  In particular, with the number of reports and tools expected to grow significantly, the system of delivering static PDF reports to users by email was not satisfactory.

The client proposed development of a BI online portal designed to deliver reports and analytical tools and was seeking a partner to undertake a proof concept to demonstrate that Cognos reports could be delivered though a portal in SharePoint.

How

Seeking a Microsoft SharePoint specialist partner to assist their BI team, the client approached Unique World, recognising its deep knowledge of information and knowledge management, and its extensive SharePoint expertise.

The assignment involved an Architectural Design and Planning phase, including advice on best practice around the management of information. The next phase involved construction of a pilot BI portal covering all aspects of the implementation including SharePoint–IBM Cognos integration, portal security, maintenance and user administration.  Unique World also made recommendations in relation to other issues, including disaster recovery.

Unique World adopted a prototyping approach to fit with the client’s Agile data warehousing methodology, promoting an iterative work plan, and encouraging a collaborative relationship with their BI team.

Now

Unique World delivered a user-friendly SharePoint interface for the Cognos BI, providing a SharePoint Reports Management System offering dynamic reports to users, streamlining production and access to standard reports. It also included a roadmap outlining the capabilities of SharePoint 2010, and uncovering potential problems involved in upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010.

The project successfully demonstrated that SharePoint 2010 was able to deliver the fundamental requirements of the client’s BI Portal.  It demonstrated the University could capitalise on its investment in SharePoint, providing a user-friendly interface to deliver IBM Cognos reports directly in SharePoint.

This proof of concept project confronted significant technical
challenges and unknowns. Unique World successfully
demonstrated Cognos and SharePoint can be successfully
integrated to provide a flexible, user-friendly BI portal front end.

Client project manager