In this data-first business era, enterprises are hard-pressed to tap into the potential of abundant business data lying across their SharePoint Servers and Farms. When nurtured with care, the hidden insights within this data have the potential of transforming your business operations and driving business growth. However, there is so much data being produced every day to collect, process and analyze this data puts an immense burden on the enterprises. From financial data, staff surveys to new leads and customer contact details, it is a time and resource-intensive practice to monitor and understand all this information. As a result, the data that could be used to drive growth and deliver differentiation in the marketplace often sits idle under the information silos.
For enterprises using SharePoint as their organization’s information hub, it is imperative to have a data aggregation plan in place. Without such a plan the volume of structured and unstructured data collected in the SharePoint environment can pile up fast, making it difficult to bring all that data together to derive any meaningful business insights.
What is Data Aggregation in SharePoint?
By now we know that enterprises have a lot of critical data lying within their SharePoint environment. However, SharePoint can be a complex mesh of sites, site collections and web applications where the data is stored across multiple servers and farms. All such data needs to be structured and presented in a way to help enterprises to achieve specific business objectives. Data aggregation solves this problem by presenting the gathered data in a report-based and summarized format helping enterprises to take critical decisions.
Challenges with SharePoint Data Aggregation
As you can see data aggregation brings all the pieces of the puzzle together, yet for most organizations, it is not prioritized. Businesses often realize the need for such a strategy when they encounter instances of crucial data missing from their reports. Enterprises that do not have a data aggregation strategy in place, risk developing bottlenecks that can disrupt data analysis while also slowing the productivity levels, wasting time and money while also causing frustrations for the top-level decision-makers. With a smart strategy in place, an enterprise can benefit from all the data it accumulates. This is why businesses need to adopt a No-code application development solution that helps users build applications to fetch and represent data in the most appealing manner.
How No-Code Solutions helps in Data Aggregation?
No-code application development solutions such as QuickApps and QuickApps for Office 365 allows businesses to create seamless applications that structure and represent information in a manner that fits the purpose. The applications can help you customize and represent data in compelling 3D charts, list views, graphs, etc. by leveraging data from multiple lists, calendars, discussion forums, and more such avenues. You can view the enterprise data without resorting to Excel spreadsheets or having to purchase a costly Business Intelligence (BI) product that might not be an ideal fit for your business purposes.
Using QuickApps for Data Aggregation
QuickApps, a set of SharePoint web app and pre-built templates, works for SharePoint on-premises and SharePoint Online and allows you to customize and build SharePoint solutions up to 80 percent faster. It’s a set of web apps that allows organizations to create visually appealing reports utilizing data from multiple sources within SharePoint. Users can build powerful reports in minutes, without the need for custom coding, based on SharePoint content, Microsoft SQL databases, business connectivity services, and external data sources. Some of its popular web apps include:
- qListView: Combines data from multiple lists, even across sites, site collections and web applications.
- qChartView: Creates compelling 3D Charts with data fetched from multiple lists across sites, site collections, and web applications.
- qCalendarView: Syndicates all calendars into one view, including data from non-calendar lists.
- qExcelView: Displays data in Microsoft Excel based on criteria passed from qListView, even when that data is not shown in the qListView.
- qDiscussionView: Shows the topic and responses of multiple discussion lists in a single tree view and preview selected items in a preview panel.
Take a QuickApps free trial to understand how it can solve your SharePoint data aggregation challenges.