SharePoint Windows SharePoint Service (WSS) has become well
known in the corporate world. Many corporations are putting lots of data in
department SharePoint sites. Some companies even use it as a basis for their
custom applications. Utilizing web parts and the SharePoint lists, one could
create a mission critical application within the framework of SharePoint,
utilizing the benefits of SharePoint's document management.
SharePoint Lists come with some standard list reports in the
SharePoint site. Many times, these simple reports cannot do the job needed for
enterprise level applications. To do more complex reports from SharePoint,
there is more than one way to get this data. Taking data from the lists and
putting them into a data warehouse is one option. By taking the data and
massaging it into a data warehouse, you have more business intelligence options
for reporting. However, none of the data is real time.
Another option is to create reports directly from the data
source using SharePoint's web service API's. You can use the MSDN
library to reference the different web service methods. This option has
the advantage of being real time. This is the option we will be utilizing for
this article
