SharePoint Plus Visual Business Intelligence

 IDV Solutions offers Visual Fusion 5, an interactive data visualization solution that starts with a map and adds in data from SharePoint, SQL Server, and Geographic Information System (GIS) tools, with the goal of helping businesses better understand their data. SharePoint content and data is ideally suited for this form of business intelligence (BI), which might be better called location intelligence. It’s deeply integrated with SharePoint, says IDV Solutions’ Scott Caulk—“We bring content together and give users the tools they’re used to using on the Internet. No one else integrates with SharePoint.”

With Visual Fusion, a business user can pull together SharePoint lists, spreadsheets, InfoPath forms, workflows, documents, and other data and see it organized on a map with various kinds of displays and interactive visuals, with the ability to query and filter the data on the fly. For example, a spatial query tool lets you draw a box which acts as a filter, trimming data to one geographic area. Charts and graphs in the rail of the UI update accordingly. You can also create your own charts, graphs, and filters, though it comes with them out of the box as well.

The tool is useful for a variety of situations, Caulk says, including asset management, supply chain visualization, market intelligence, security and workforce management. He demoed a hypothetical book store chain and how it could use the tool to see trends, track sales, display data, and more, including meshing the tool with storm data and showing the stores located in the projected path of a hurricane. To learn more, see the website of IDV Solutions.