Hello everyone, in this article we will see How to configure Business Intelligence Center Site in your SharePoint 2013 Server. Before we go any further, I just want to share some useful definition and usage of BI site from msdn site – “A BI Center site is a SharePoint site that was designed especially for BI content, such as data connections, reports, scorecards, and dashboards. Whether you’re an administrator, report author, or information consumer, a BI Center site can be a valuable resource. It’s not just a place to store files, it’s also a way to bring together information and processes using a variety of BI tools.”
Let’s see how to configure the BI center site collection, this is a very simple process. The BI Site Collection is simply another site collection template in our SharePoint 2013 server
1. Go to Central Administration -> Create Site Collection ( under Application Management)
2. Make sure that you want this BI site collection under proper Web Application. Give a Title, Description and provide Web site address (URL) name.
3. Select the Business Intelligence Center site collection template under Enterprise tab, I just want to make a note here, that I’m using SharePoint 2013 Enterprise edition. And Provide Primary and secondary site collection admin.
4. I am not using any Quota Template here, so I go ahead and click on OK.
5. BI Center site collection has been successfully created.
I’m not going to stop here, I will go to that site collection and take a look at our site and test out some sample excel workbook there.
Here is our BI Center site and this is what we just created. And you can see lot of information about using PowerPivot, Power View and Excel Services. We’ll look into those services in my upcoming article.
Go to Site Contents -> Documents. As I said earlier, I’ll take you to the sample workbook which was created when we create the BI site collection.
Its great way to go ahead and test out whether Excel Services are working or not. Actually I haven’t configured my Excel Service yet and that will be my next article to show How to Configure Excel Service.
You can see that little preview, because of the Excel Web App and I have the Office Web App server as part of my farm, it’s up and running. This is not Excel Services. Excel Services is not rendering this workbook for us in the browser, the Office Web App server is.
If we go ahead here and click on ‘View in Browser’. It’ll be rendered in the browser by the Office Web App Server. And you see the URL, it’s using the ‘WopiFram‘ for the Office Web App server but the URL would be different if we use Excel Services.
That’s it for this article, thanks for reading.
Happy Coding
Ahamed
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