Some Interesting Possibilities Displaying Raiser's Edge Reports and Dashboards in SharePoint

So you have invested in Microsoft SharePoint and you are trying to figure out how you can get the most bang for your buck.  Your organization also has purchased and implemented The Raiser's Edge.  You may be feeling that the reports in The Raiser's Edge are lacking, or that you don't have enough licenses to allow everyone in your organization to connect to The Raiser's Edge at the same time.  Perhaps you don't want to have to train all your end-users, especially those that only need reports anyway, on how to use The Raiser's Edge.

Well, you can leverage the SharePoint platform to display information from The Raiser's Edge via web pages.  It could be dashboards and other reports, lists of data, or even detailed information about your constituents, events, or other records in RE.  Imagine if you have users that need only read-only access: being able to have a web page in SharePoint where the user can enter filter or search criteria and view those constituents that meet the criteria along with details about those constituents, all without having to log into The Raiser's Edge.

Below are some of the ways that SharePoint can be leveraged to display this RE information, or any other information from any SQL database or other data sources:

ASP.NET Web Parts
Many ASP.NET web parts, such as the Grid View and Data List, available with SharePoint Designer, allow us to query and display data from different data sources in many types of formats, typically in a table or form layout. They can work with any data source that’s available in SharePoint Designer, like SQL Server, XML files, and more.  And with The Raiser's Edge being SQL-Server based, these web parts can be used to display this data. Another advantage is that it is easy to customize and considered "out-of-the-box"  and a "no-code" solution.  Check out this blog post where I use an ASP.NET to show a recent gift list from The Raiser's Edge.

Business Connectivity Services
The Business Connectivity Services allows SharePoint to connect to other systems, such as The Raiser's Edge, you already have, and work with them in various ways. A developer can configure the data connections to connect to The Raiser's Edge and import data into external content types, which can then be viewed in a SharePoint list.  What is great is this capability is native to SharePoint 2010 and 2013, however it can be a bit awkward at times, depending on what you might want to do.  In addition, it is meant to allow for data interaction (adding, editing, etc.) and not only for the consumption of data.  With The Raiser's Edge being a complex relational database model, it is advised that this feature not be utilized to update Raiser's Edge data, but to only view data.  Our first entry to show how BCS might be used is posted at the following link.

Excel Services
Excel Services provides the capability to display a named item from a Microsoft Excel workbook, such as a named range or chart, as a web part in a SharePoint web page.  This allows end users to build reports in Microsoft Excel and with developer assistance, display these for others to view as components in a web page.  A developer could even automate the creation of the Excel reports, the publication of the Excel workbook to SharePoint, and WHAM, all the reports are automagically updated.

SQL Server Reporting Services
SQL Server Reporting Services provides a full range of ready-to-use tools and services to help you create, deploy, and manage reports for your organization, as well as programming features that enable you to extend and customize your reporting functionality.  With Reporting Services, you can create interactive, tabular, graphical, or free-form reports from relational, multidimensional, or XML-based data sources. Reports can include rich data visualization, including charts, maps, and sparklines. You can publish reports, schedule report processing, or access reports on-demand. You can select from a variety of viewing formats, export reports to other applications such as Microsoft Excel, and subscribe to published reports. The reports that you create can be viewed over a Web-based connection or as part of a Microsoft Windows application or SharePoint site. You can also create data alerts on reports published to a SharePoint site and receive email messages when report data changes.

Visual Studio Custom Web Part
Visual Studio can be a powerful medium for creating components that can hook into SharePoint or The Raiser's Edge.  A custom web part that gives the developer more control over the visual presentation can be created with this development platform.  For example, a developer could create a visual web part that displays a chart based on some data from The Raiser's Edge.  This chart could be created by hooking into Google Charts to render the visual presentation of the chart.  I hope to create an example of this to show the power.  Parameters and Properties could be added to the web part to give further implemention options.  For examnple, one web part could allow the person deploying the web part on one page to display a pie chart for each Campaign, but on another the same web part could display the chart per Fund.  All in all, this is the most customizable option to creating that perfect set of web parts.

There are more options but these are a few of the highlights of possible ways to deploy Raiser's Edge reports and dashboards to SharePoint.  I hope to post an example for each of these in the coming months to give you detailed examples.  This type of reporting can be used for many other databases as well.  Contact us via email or go to our website to let us know how we can help you improve the way you work with The Raiser's Edge or Sharepoint.