SharePoint is getting even more powerful!! Welcome PerformancePoint Services!
Some very exciting news was announced yesterday. SharePoint’s mission has always been to provide collaboration to the masses. Collaboration in the broadest sense has meant business intelligence capability with Excel integration, Excel Services, KPIs, Report Center, etc.
Well, as of yesterday, collaboration to the masses now also includes BI for the masses with the inclusion of PerformancePoint Services. Yep, that’s right! The next version of SharePoint (aka SharePoint14) will include PerformancePoint Services. You say you can’t wait till SharePoint14, well you might not have to, read on…
This is an update to our Business Intelligence roadmap. This will greatly facilitate delivering BI to everyone in the organization.
Specifically, this includes consolidating the scorecard, dashboard, and analytic functionality from PerformancePoint Server into SharePoint Server Enterprise as PerformancePoint Services.
PerformancePoint Services will be a license entitlement for SharePoint Server 2007 ECAL customers with Software Assurance. This means that customers who want to deploy PerformancePoint can do so today at no additional cost. Yep, you read that right.
PerformancePoint Server 2007 will no longer be available as a standalone item after April 1, 2009.
For more info,
Microsoft Business Intelligence strategy update and SharePoint
Microsoft Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence with Microsoft® Office PerformancePoint Server 2007
For me, this is a very exciting announcement, specifically for two reasons:
1. For a lot of my customers, BI is something that they want to do, but many find it cost prohibitive and some have it siloed within the organization so that only a few have access. There are likely many other reasons but the end result is a less than successful implementation and utilization. They now don’t have to worry about buying a separate BI point solution that doesn’t integrate very well. They already have their enterprise portal and collaboration environment in MOSS, and now they’ll have excellent BI as well.
2. A lot of customers are very interested in a few of the ECAL features, but not enough to push them to pay the additional licensing costs. With the ECAL now including PPS, this will definitely rock their world, IMHO, and enable even greater collaboration capability.
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