As you know SharePoint has many areas of capabilities and Insights is one of them. This area is one of the most important for companies. It provides powerful business intelligence (BI) functionality. What is business intelligence and why it is so important?

While working process companies are used to create a great amount of data like be documents, workbooks, databases which are of great importance. And usually they use reports to collect the necessary information. This process takes time and nerves and it requires IT intervention. What is more, the level of security is not proper because some content may be misplaced, copied, lost and so on.

Business Intelligence helps to solve all these problems and structuralize and visualize business information in a proper format and when it’s necessary. Well, Business Intelligence (BI) – it is a number of tools and applications which were created for storing, gathering, analysis of information, sharing and publishing it  from different sources. BI tools enables customers automatically extract required data and create a report. This gives them a significant opportunity to make important business decisions and present your data as meaningful information. The other benefit of Business Intelligence is keeping data securely and ability to assign permissions to access content according to the job roles of users.

As I`ve already said, Business Intelligence is provided by the Insights in SharePoint 2010. With it users are empowered to create and share dashboards, collaborate with them using improved communities functions. Additionally, thy can find the relevant information which is based on BI criteria using Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010. SharePoint 2010 provides a wide range of services like storing and managing BI related information in one central location – Report Center which is one of the main features. It also provides Excel, Visio and PerformancePoint services, a variety of web parts such as Chart or Filter web parts, and the ability to use and develop dashboards and connect to different external sources.

But note that in order to use SharePoint 2010 BI components and services SharePoint 2010 Enterprise CALs are required.

If you don’t have SharePoint 2010 and want to appreciate all the benefits of SharePoint Insights you need to sign up SharePoint 2010 Enterprise form one of the reliable provider, which is critical to a successful SharePoint hosting experience, has high level of performance, security and support. The best way to test it is to sign up for a 30 day, no obligation, free trial. I can recommend PlexHosted, as the example of company which meets all these requirements.