From the abstract:

“This white paper provides guidance and best practices for the decision makers who are involved in designing and building a Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007 Planning application.

The authors of this white paper review the methodology and structure of the fundamentals but do not provide step-by-step guidance on implementing them.”

And please remember to leave feedback. We really do read it and it informs our publishing work.

Government Computer News is a highly regarded source that covers IT news within the federal government. GCN Labs regularly test and review software, and came just published a very favorable review of Access 2007.

Congratulations to the Access team!

Chris Pendleton explains more about how Virtual Earth is being utilized by Ask.com.

Wordle works by turning text into word clouds “giving greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.” Click on the image below to see the full size version.

Help for PerformancePoint Server 2007

We’re now offering a short help page on that subject, as well as:

How to find the help you need in Dashboard Viewer for SharePoint Services

How to use Visio Viewer with a strategy map deployed in a dashboard

Filter your data in Dashboard Viewer for SharePoint Services

Annotate a scorecard in a deployed dashboard

These help and How to topics and more are available for viewing at our Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007 Web page on Office Online.

Creating Dynamic Web Page Reports

“As a follow up to my post on debugging filter links with web page reports I thought it would be worthwhile to put together a quick example to illustrate just what an unsung hero the web page report type is. Just think of the web page report as the catch-all report type. Basically, if you can't do it with one of the many pre-baked M&A report types then the web page report is what you want.

In the debugging filter links post we saw how dashboard items communicate with each other by embedding data in the Request.Params collection. In that example we simply displayed the contents of this collection. The next logical step is to actually do something with those contextual values we are passing to the report item at runtime. Remember that all the web page report does is send the user to a static URL, the dynamic part comes from two places:

1. the incoming filter links configured on the report item embedded in the dashboard
2. what is done with this filter link data by the code contained in the page we send the user to

Web page reports pretty much opens up the entire .NET framework to us, the possibilities are virtually limitless.

For example, let's imagine (in a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances) that our users want a dashboard page that will allow them to select  which search engine they wish to use. They wish to select their search engine of choice using a dropdown. the home page of the search engine name they select will appear in the dashboard and they can then search to their hearts content.”

Read the full blog post here.

Alan works for TGO Consulting and is Microsoft-certified in PerformancePoint Server 2007. I was pointed to his blog by Microsoft MVP Adrian Downes, who co-wrote two excellent books on the subject, and to whom I STILL owe a book review (soon, I promise!).

Peter Eb

Peter is a Microsoft developer who's working on the Excel Add-in for our product, and his blog provides helpful tips for customers who are using the Planning side of PPS. Thanks to Microsoft MVP Nick Barclay, Adrian's co-author, for posting about Peter's blog at BI-Lingual..

I'll be adding both of these blogs to the Data Puzzle list of recommended BI blogs shortly. Congratulations to Alan and Peter for doing some fine work to date.

I love this approach to mapping and visualizing data to enhance analysis created by IntellectSpace. Click on the picture to see how IntellectSpace works.

Hat tip to the excellent Sources and Methods for pointing me to it.