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Microsoft Office
PerformancePoint Server
KMA has had the
opportunity to
evaluate Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007
(PerformancePoint), both as a part of the Community Technology Preview
(CTP) program, and also as part of early-adopter training recently
offered to key partners. PerformancePoint is a new performance
management application from Microsoft that includes business
scorecarding, analytics and planning functionality.
Microsoft’s objective with PerformancePoint is to make high-end
business intelligence capability more accessible to medium and small
sized organizations, and to make it easier to use, more affordable and
maintainable by the IT staff. As one might expect,
PerformancePoint is tightly integrated with other Microsoft
technologies, using SQL Server 2005 as a database engine, SharePoint
2007 as a delivery mechanism for scorecards, reports and analytical
information, and Excel 2007 as a point of entry for budget and planning
data, and for advanced consolidations and other reporting. There
are four principal components to PerformancePoint:
- Planning.
This component is a toolset
originally known as “Biz #” (pronounced “Biz Sharp”), and is a Business
Modeler that guides users through modeling and budgeting
processes. Excel, SQL Server, and SharePoint are used for data
entry forms, workflows, templates, and approvals. In this module, Excel
is used as a user interface for the creation of cubes in SQL Server
2005 Analysis Services, without requiring users to go into SQL Server
to define tables, etc. to set up cubes. Also, in both this and
the reporting areas, PerformancePoint enables very granular permissions
to enable security at a broad variety of levels.
- Monitoring.
This component comprises the
Business Scorecard Manager (BSM) 2007 product and provides a framework
for construction of scorecards for measuring business performance and
graphically presenting it to business decision-makers. Compared
to BSM 2005, BSM 2007 features a new Office 2007-like “ribbon”
interface, tighter integration with SQL Server Analysis Services, and
other improvements such as better access to the time dimension in
constructing scorecards.
- Analytics.
This component comprises version
6.3 of the ProClarity product (acquired by Microsoft in April, 2006),
and provides rich visualization capabilities for data analytics, so
that users can analyze and gain insight to trends in business data.
- Reporting.
This component comprises the
combination of Excel Reporting Services, SQL Server Reporting Services,
and Office SharePoint Server, and provides rich reporting and
consolidation capabilities, including such elements as allocations,
multi-currency, and intercompany eliminations. This reporting may
look familiar to users who have seen the Microsoft Business Solutions
Enterprise Reporting product in the past, as they have some of the same
DNA. Note: reporting is not a separate “module” of
PerformancePoint like the other three, but is incorporated across the
whole suite.
PerformancePoint is
currently in its first CTP release, and it is
expected to be released to the market in third quarter of 2007.
Although there are several tier-one applications in the market today
such as OutlookSoft, Hyperion, Business Objects, MicroStrategy, and
Cognos, Microsoft is expected to have a compelling offering with
aggressive pricing and tight integration to tools such as SQL Server,
Excel and SharePoint Server, even (initially) without the functional
richness of the other products. For example,
PerformancePoint will leverage SQL Server 2005 tools like:
- SQL Server
Integration Services, to enable
integration of disparate data sources into cubes for analysis
- SQL Server
Notification Services, to transmit
notifications to users upon events (e.g., changes in a model)
- “Snapshot capability”
in SQL Server to enable
administrators to generate and use read-only static views of the
database at a point in time.
We found several challenges and limitations to the software used in our
early-stage training, but Microsoft has about eight months, per the
current schedule, to resolve the issues prior to release to
manufacturing.
PerformancePoint will be worth investigating for customers undertaking
business intelligence or performance management initiatives in calendar
2007, and Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant” report for Business Intelligence,
due to be released in Q1 of 2007, should show Microsoft gaining
momentum vs. incumbent players.
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