Big Changes in Performance Point Server and MOSS! I cant wait!

Darrin Bishop — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:43:13 GMT

This is great for the SharePoint world! Last week Microsoft announced that anyone who purchased MOSS Enterprise with Software Assurance would now be able to access Performance Point Server with no additional CALs. I had heard about this sometime ago. But wait there is more

Performance Point Server is actually "two" products :
Planning Server - Supports the planning of an organization.
Monitoring and Analytics Server - Dashboards, charts, graphs and KPIs.

Microsoft announced Friday that Performance Point Server - as we know it today - will be "discontinued". More specifically the Planning Server portion will not have another major product release. The key components of Monitoring and Analytics will be rolled into MOSS Enterprise and will no longer be a separate standalone product.

I have no inside information other that what Microsoft has posted. It seems that SP3 for PPS will ship mid 2009 but no more major releases for PPS in the current form. I have seem some references to Performance Point Services for SharePoint. This is a huge announcement in the Microsoft SharePoint community. MOSS Enterprise, with Excel Services, Integrated Reporting Services and Excel Client will be the DEFACTO business intelligence platform for Microsoft.

Microsoft SharePoint/BI Case Study - A Small Look at What I Have Been Up To.

Darrin Bishop — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:53:28 GMT

Here is a little update of what I have been working on lately. One of the many SharePoint projects at the Illinois Department of Transportation is a set of Business Intelligence portals. This project culminated in a Microsoft BI case study :

The Illinois Department of Transportation Saves Lives with Microsoft Business Intelligence Solution

This case study focuses in on the PerformancePoint Server aspects of our BI Portal but rest assured that MOSS was key in the overall solution. For those that do not know, PerformancePoint Server is Microsoft's business intelligence platform that publishes key business intelligence to SharePoint and provides a much higher level of functionality than the MOSS business intelligence components. Working with a team that included business intelligence members we built out some key financial and safety portals. Key to these BI portals was the concept that all types of information that is used for decision making found a place in the portal. This included Excel Spreadsheets and Excel Services, Word and PDF files, Business Scorecards, Reports , Trends and Dashboards, Business Data Catalog applications and even some Silverlight.

Overall the portals allow a user to trend and report on key measures using PerformancePoint and then drill down into the details using BDC applications, custom Web Parts and a Silverlight application.