PerformancePoint Merged with Sharepoint

http://www.microsoft.com/business/performancepoint/

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/jan09/01-27KurtDelbeneQA.mspx

Based on customer feedback, Microsoft is moving the scorecard, dashboard, and analytic functionality from Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server into Office SharePoint Server Enterprise, making these highly valuable capabilities available throughout the organization at a lower total cost of ownership. As of April 1, 2009, PerformancePoint Server 2007 will no longer be available for purchase. During mid 2009, Microsoft will release PerformancePoint Server 2007 "Service Pack 3" which will include updates to the current product's Planning module.

Analyst Reports:

IDC: Another Step Toward Pervasive Business Intelligence: Microsoft Realigns BI Product Portfolio and Its Internal Organization
"The closer alignment of these technologies positions Microsoft well to take advantage of the current broad trend for more pervasive availability of BI and related solutions." - Dan Vesset, IDC

AMR: Microsoft Repackages BI and PM Products to Further Promote Mass Adoption
"This decision, which was not wholly unanticipated, streamlines Microsoft’s BI story and uses its trinity of beachhead products—MOSS, Excel, and SQL Server—as the vehicles to cost effectively bring business intelligence to the masses…The closer alignment of these technologies positions Microsoft well to take advantage of the current broad trend for more pervasive availability of BI and related solutions." - John Hagerty, AMR Research

Press:

Gartner: Microsoft Shifts Strategy on PerformancePoint Server
Gartner evaluates Microsoft’s recent BI strategy shift.

Intelligent Enterprise - Microsoft’s Big Change on Performance Management (and BI)
"Cost of ownership goes well beyond licensing costs. But indeed licensing is the most notable out-of-pocket expense,
and Microsoft's approach to seeding the market has clearly been a successful strategy. In today's economy, it's a great move by Microsoft." – Cindi Howson

CRN: Microsoft Adds Muscle to SharePoint Server
"Microsoft made the right move by eliminating a separate SKU and adding more functionality to SharePoint. Many customers are looking to leverage critical business information in a more consolidated and cohesive way, and PerformancePoint dashboards are finding their way into basic SharePoint applications for management." - Ken Winell, CEO of ExpertCollab

SQL Magazine: Game Changing Announcement for Microsoft BI
"The impact of this announcement for the BI market in 2009 is vast. Consider each and every SharePoint Enterprise Edition customer as a first-order PerformancePoint monitoring and analytics customer. This ties right back to the strategy of encouraging customers to use the software they own, with their data to create value." - Barry Ralston

Computerworld: Microsoft folds PerformancePoint Server into SharePoint
"We thought there was a much better way to achieve our goal of 'BI for the masses,' which is to make these features a seamless part of how they already work with SharePoint, SQL Server or Excel." – Kristina Kerr

Microsoft Corp. has launched Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 RTM Version

Read the press release here

Apart from the microsoft connect website, evaluation version available for every one here

For PPS 2007 Official link click here

For case studies, click here

For PPS 2007 Documentation, click here

For PPS 2007 Documentation on MSDN, click here

For PPS 2007 Technet Link, click here

For PPS 2007 Training, click here

For PPS2007 Team Blog, click here

CTP4 of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 is now available!

The 32-bit version of PerformancePoint Server 2007 CTP4 is available as of August 15.
The 64-bit version of PerformancePoint Server 2007 CTP4 is available as of August 22.
Sample data for Monitoring Server is available with the CTP4 release.
Sample data for Planning Server, including the Alpine Ski House sample application, will be available at RTM. There is no sample data for Planning Server in the CTP4 release.

What's new for CTP4 Monitoring and Analytics

The following Monitoring and Analytics features have been added to Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 (CTP4):

Dashboards
· OLAP View Sorting/Filtering. Users can now sort (by column) and filter empty rows/columns in Analytic Charts and Grids.
· OLAP View Types. Users can now switch between grids and charts and also change chart types (includes bar charts, stacked bar charts, stacked 100% bar charts, line charts and combined bar/line charts).
· OLAP Member Properties in Grid. Users can now add attributes of a member into the OLAP grid.
· Cell Level Actions. Users can now see the cell level actions behind a value in an OLAP grid or chart.
· Export to PowerPoint. SharePoint users can now export dashboard views to Microsoft Office PowerPoint.
· Multiple Filters. Users can now pass multiple dashboard filters to scorecards and report views.
· Dashboard Viewer for SharePoint Services Users can now add PerformancePoint Monitoring dashboard items to an existing SharePoint page through a new PerformancePoint Web Part.

Dashboard Designer
· Dashboard Designer Ribbon Changes. Usability improvements within the Dashboard Designer Ribbon, which is part of the Microsoft® Office Fluent™ User Interface.
· OLAP View Configuration. Enables light configuration options on charts and grid (fonts, formats, chart legend placement, grid layout).
· PAS Integration. Users can now add PAS report views into their dashboards.
· Time Intelligence KPI Filters. Users can now add Time Intelligence expressions to individual KPIs.
· Scorecard Filters. Users can now pass members from scorecards into report views. (Example: Passing the KPI Name to an SSRS report.)

Excel Services Support
· Excel Services as a Data Source. Users can now import tables or named ranges from Excel Services spreadsheets.

What's new for CTP4 Planning

The Planning component of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 (CTP4) does not have significant changes from its previous release (CTP2). The following list contains the targeted improvements delivered by this latest release:

Business Modeler
· Business Rule Templates. Several additional rule templates have been added.
· PPSCmd. The command-line tool had some additions to provide ability for scripting of overall system processes. For example, the ability to deploy and reprocess models and data.
· Migration. Additional feature work was done to enable migration of an application between two server environments.
· Jobs. Improved user experience for executing and managing jobs.
· Data Types. Dimension member properties now support more data types

Excel Client
· Offline Cache. Improved management of locally cached objects.
· Templates. Additional report templates have been added.
· Review and Approval. Reviewers and Approvers can now manage submissions through a single dialog. Support has been added for bulk operations.
· Filters. Form and report filters now support dimension properties.

Server
· Performance. Several changes were made to improve overall server performance. Additionally, Financial Job and calculations have specific performance enhancements.
· System Information. Error message reporting and system logging has been improved from prior releases.
· Associations. Improved capabilities for working with complex associations. Better performance handling large associations and movement of large data set.
· Security. Public interfaces have improved resistance to any potentially malicious attacks.

For more details, click here.

The top-four worst BI practices

Excerpt from here:
1. Assuming the average business user has the know-how or the time to use BI tools
2. Allowing Excel to become the default BI “platform”
3. Assuming a data warehouse will solve all information access and delivery requirements
4. Selecting a BI tool without a specific business need

Business Intelligence, what is it and what is it not?

I have come across an interesting article and would like to post it on my blog.
read the complete article here.
Excerpt:
Introduction
What is Business Intelligence? The term "Business intelligence" was coined by Howard Dresner in the late 80s to describe an emerging discipline concerned with the discovery of information in an enterprise. Over the years the term has become diluted and ambiguous and thus has come to mean a great many things to a great many people. In this blog entry I want to explain exactly what I believe Business Intelligence (BI) is and, crucially, what it is not.

Gazumping Some Myths
Firstly, it is necessary to explode a few myths about BI. I use the term "information worker" herein to refer to a person that would make use of BI.

Myth #1 : BI is synonymous with Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

Myth #2 : BI is all about tools

Myth #3 : BI is synonymous with a data warehouse

Conclusion
It is time for Business Intelligence applications to step over the boundaries that traditional paradigms have enforced upon it. The world of work is changing, people have different demands of their data and delivering valuable information in a timely manner is more important now than it has ever been.

read the complete article here.

SaaS – the next frontier for buying activity in BI?

Having successfully established itself in CRM, software as a service (SaaS) has now surfaced as the delivery model du jour in the business intelligence (BI) sector. The number of vendors offering some type of BI or BI-related hosted service is now in the double digits, up from less than a handful last year. Consolidation is still at an early stage with Business Objects (Nasdaq: BOBJ) and Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN) leading acquisition activity. Business Objects acquired SaaS platform provider Nsite Software in a deal we valued at $8m last November. Two months later, Cognos picked up Celequest for $12m (based on our estimate), which provided the company with – among other capabilities – a hosted real-time dashboard service.

Possible acquirers

Company Cash and short-term investments Microsoft $28.2bn (as of March 31) Oracle $6.4bn (as of February 28) SAP $5.1bn (as of March 31) HP $12.3bn (as of April 30) IBM $10.8bn (as of March 31)

Possible targets

Company Recent funding/total funding Verix $12.75m (February 2006)/$18.9m Oco $14.5m (January 2007)/Not disclosed SeaTab Software $3.5m (February 2007)/$4.5m Adaptive Planning $7.5m (December 2006)/$19m

Conclusion

Verix, SeaTab, Adaptive Planning and Oco are by no means the only attractive acquisition candidates with hosted BI-related services. LucidEra, probably the best-known startup in this space, is another. Several consulting companies including OnDemandIQ, which has a hosted dashboard and reporting service and Certica Solutions, which has a hosted data quality service, are also possible acquisition candidates. It remains to be seen which of these players will remain independent. But what is clear to us is that the sector in which all these vendors play will see more M&A action. And if it's not led by Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, then HP (NYSE: HPQ) or IBM (NYSE: IBM) – given both players' BI ambitions – could well be the ones in the M&A driving seat.

Read the complete article here

Microsoft announces Microsoft Office Performance Point Server PPS 2007 CTP 3 Release

PPS 2007 CTP 3 release is available on microsoft connect website

Whats New in CTP 3?

• Planning Server functionality, features, and documentation are the same as in our April CTP2 release.
• Monitoring Server has updated functionality, features, and documentation for this release.

Microsoft has announced two new CTP programs:

1. Management Reporter is a reporting application designed to enable information workers to take control of their business by creating and analyzing feature rich reports. It is an application tailored to general users for creating, maintaining, deploying and viewing boardroom quality financial statements. Users can easily monitor the health of the business and quickly understand what’s happening at any point in time. Management Reporter integrates with the General Ledger (GL) system or Financial Data Mart (FDM) allowing users to run financial statements within minutes after installing the application.

2. The Data Integration Toolkit is a set of software, documentation, and samples designed to enable partners and customers to expose data from financial source systems in a standardized, contextual format for use in reporting, planning, monitoring and analytics scenarios.