476 HOUR 23: Introducing Business Intelligence with SharePoint 2010 TABLE 23.1 Item Data Sources Dashboards Items That Can Be Created with the Dashboard Designer Description Contain connection related information for connecting to a back- end data source. A container for displaying reports and scorecards, organized in a meaningful way that makes sense to business users and decision-makers. Compare actual results to the target and represents the out- come using visual indicators. Scorecards contain one or more KPIs. Metrics that can be used on scorecards; contain target and actual values and graphical indicators to indicate deviation. Graphical symbols indicating the actual value is on or off track. Enable you to filter the dashboard content. Contain charts or tables to display information. Scorecards KPIs Indicators Filters Reports Creating Your First Dashboard As explained earlier, a PPS Dashboard is a container for displaying reports and scorecards, organized in a meaningful way that makes sense to business users and decision-makers. Hence the creation of a dashboard effectively involves planning and creating individual dashboard elements (that is, reports and scorecards) and deploying the dashboard to SharePoint. At a higher level, to create a PPS dashboard, you need to perform the following tasks, in this sequence: 1. Create a new data source; say, pointing to the Adventure Works cube. 2. Create one or more scorecards and/or reports. 3. Create a dashboard and add the scorecards and reports to it. 4. Deploy the dashboard to SharePoint. The Try It Yourself section next explores these steps further, by creating a dashboard based on the Adventure Works cube deployed earlier.