Think of SharePoint as the jack-of-all-trades in the business software realm. Companies use it to create Web sites and then manage content for those sites. It can help workers collaborate on projects and documents. And it has a variety of corporate search and business intelligence tools too.

Microsoft wraps all of this software up into a package and sells the bundle at a reasonable price. In fact, the total cost of the bundle often comes in below what specialist companies would charge for a single application in, say, the business intelligence or corporate search fields.

Business Intelligence (BI) is a catch phrase that was coined in the mid-1990s to describe taking data from its raw form and turning it into something usable that business decisions can be based on. It is an umbrella term that ties together other closely related data disciplines including data mining, statistical analysis, forecasting, and decision support. Developers should take an interest in BI as BI features are being built into new versions of developer tools and databases. For example both Microsoft (with MS Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005) and Oracle (with Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Developer Suite) tout BI as important components. And as BI begins to pop up as a job title, part of a job description, or in project specifications, you'll need to know just exactly what it refers to.

A BI platform is going to tie in to your corporate database platform. For the front end, there will be a user reporting and querying interface, typically a browser-based model that users will already understand the basic UI for. There are scores of BI products sold as add-ons for all of the major database platforms. One drawback is that these can be expensive to purchase, implement, and support. As mentioned above, there are also new BI features making their way into core development tools and RDBMS products. In the Microsoft example, with the VS 2005 and SQL Server 2005 products, a developer should be able to create a home-grown BI system using the VS 2005 environment which provides built-in hooks to the SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services BI components. The drawback of that model is that the developer needs to learn a new version of the tool and to work with new components, costly in terms of developer time and training.