1. PerformancePoint Services
Those who have followed Microsoft business
intelligence technologies will probably recall Business Scorecard
Manager, which became a component of PerformancePoint Server.
PerformancePoint Server 2007 was its own product and was deployed to a
dedicated, stand-alone server. Microsoft has now integrated
PerformancePoint Services into SharePoint 2010 Enterprise and extends
its capabilities with new and improved features.
PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint 2010 is a
performance management service that an organization can leverage to
monitor and analyze its business. In an earlier section, we talked
about building dashboards and scorecards for graphical presentations of
key decision-making data. In SharePoint Enterprise, the definition,
construction, and management of dashboards and scorecards is done with
PerformancePoint Services. The high-value proposition here is that
because PerformancePoint Services provides a rich and easy-to-use way
to construct dashboards, scorecards, and KPIs, and SharePoint offers a
natural presentation tier for this data, the bar has been raised on the
business intelligence capabilities that can be originated within
SharePoint. Remember, we talked earlier about using SharePoint to store
reports or present information gathered in other places, like Excel.
With PerformancePoint Services, we’re actually talking about a
front-to-back business intelligence solution that offers a full gamut
of tools for gathering, analyzing, and presenting corporate metrics.
How Does PerformancePoint Services Work?
Users
familiar with PerformancePoint Server 2007 will notice a fundamental
change in how PerformancePoint Services works. It no longer is a
separate Web application in IIS with its own SQL Server database; it is
fully integrated with SharePoint 2010. This means that PerformancePoint
Services stores its data in SharePoint document libraries and lists.
Because of this, it can naturally take advantage of the features that
exist natively with SharePoint, the most compelling being security
integration. Very much like Excel Services, PerformancePoint Services
is a service within SharePoint that is integrated with the Microsoft
SharePoint Foundation; when you have the Enterprise version of
SharePoint 2010 running in your environment, you have full access to
the capabilities of PerformancePoint without having to install or
configure anything new.
Why Use PerformancePoint Services?
PerformancePoint Services is specifically targeted
as a Performance Management solution. Performance Management allows
business users to monitor and analyze their businesses by presenting
key data and metrics that can facilitate change (from business process
to product development to staffing).
With PerformancePoint Services
An organization can use a single platform
for “pushing” key business metrics to all employees. The “outreach”
component of the PerformancePoint Services tool (and thus SharePoint)
is very important in that a company can get data in the hands of
decision makers of all levels more quickly and efficiently.
Individual
business users can take advantage of metrics presented via
PerformancePoint Services as one component of their collective business
activities, meaning that it can be integrated with native collaborative
tools in SharePoint to offer context and execution outside the data
that is shown.
IT can provide the
business with a single tool for showcasing data that has been
aggregated though a master repository such as a data warehouse. By
using a tool like SharePoint, which is already highly leveraged for
collaboration and communication, IT has fewer systems to support and
less effort associated with monitoring and training users in diverse
business applications.
PerformancePoint
Services provides all of the functionality needed for performance
management, including scorecards, dashboards, management reporting, and
analytics. Reporting is also integrated with PerformancePoint Services
to provide planning, budgeting, and forecasting output. As mentioned
before, all of this is done within the context of an existing
SharePoint environment offering business users a single interface for
collaboration and analysis. The main advantage of PerformancePoint is
that users can see more robust scorecards and dashboards and then be
able to click a metric to drill down to subdashboards or even the raw
data.
What’s New with PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint 2010?
There are a number of improvements that Microsoft
made to the PerformancePoint functionality as part of the integration
with SharePoint 2010. Here are some key elements:
Integration with SharePoint.
Dashboards and dashboard items are stored and secured within SharePoint
lists and libraries. This offers several important benefits:
SharePoint
security is now used to manage data access. This makes it a more
integrated platform that can leverage an existing SharePoint security
model.
Because all of the data now
exists in SharePoint, it is automatically part of the SharePoint
capacity and disaster recovery planning. This offers business users the
comfort of knowing that key data will be supported with the same
strength of SharePoint management.
PerformancePoint
Services information is presented in Web Parts, just like all other Web
Parts, so they can be managed and even linked in the same way as other
Web parts.
Better scorecards.
Scorecards have been improved to allow for better drill down into
detail information. Business users can even create custom metrics that
use multiple data sources. In addition, scorecards now have a richer
and easier way to sort and filter data presented.
SQL Server 2008.
PerformancePoint Services supports SQL Server Analysis Services 2008.
For those organizations that have taken advantage of the enhanced
features in SQL Server 2008, PerformancePoint Services can be used to
connect to that data.
Better reporting. PerformancePoint
Services offers new chart types and more formatting options so
reporting can better present the “right” chart or graph to present data.
Time intelligence.
One of the more common user requests associated with business
intelligence reporting is the ability to more easily manipulate the
presentation of data based on time intervals. PerformancePoint Services
offers more flexible time intelligence that allows business users to
have better control of scorecard presentation.
Linked Web Parts.
PerformancePoint Web Parts can be linked, much like other SharePoint
Web Parts, so that user interaction on one can automatically alter the
presentation of data in another.
Dashboard development. PerformancePoint Services includes a Dashboard Designer that allows business users to easily create and deploy dashboards.
Accessibility compliance.
Business intelligence data is intended to be useful to all users,
independent of accessibility challenges. PerformancePoint Services
offers a more flexible interface to comply with accessibility
challenges.
Decomposition Tree.
The Decomposition Tree, which can be in a scorecard or dashboard, is a
new visualization report type available in PerformancePoint Services.
It allows business users to navigate down from higher-level data values
into lower-level details to better understand the presentation of those
values.
KPI Details report.
The KPI Details report is a new report type that displays information
about metrics within a scorecard. The KPI Details report is a Web Part
in SharePoint 2010 and can be connected to PerformancePoint Services
scorecards to offer a more granular presentation of the data behind a
metric.
2. Visio Services
What does Visio have to do with business
intelligence? Well, if you recall an earlier definition that stated
business intelligence is mostly about “telling a story” with few words,
then showing information in Visio diagrams is just as impactful.
Business users have used Microsoft Visio for some time to represent
corporate data. One of the challenges, however, has been that not all
content consumers had Visio on their desktops, so distribution of Visio
charts was sometimes a challenge. Visio Services has been introduced
with SharePoint 2010. It operates very much the same way as Excel Services or PerformancePoint Services in that it acts as a service in the context of a SharePoint environment.
Why Use Visio Services?
There are three main benefits to using Visio Services:
A business user can share a presentation of
data created in Microsoft Visio in the browser without requiring the
content consumer to have Visio installed on his or her desktop.
Once
a diagram from Visio has been deployed, information can be refreshed so
that changes made in Visio can automatically be refreshed in the
browser presentation.
Much like Excel
Services and PerformancePoint Services, Visio diagrams can be shown in
the context of an already familiar SharePoint environment.
Visio Services supports diagrams connected to one or more of the following data sources:
Visio Services is an exciting new tool that
offers business users an easy way to share diagrams. Because it
operates as a service within SharePoint, Visio Services has a very low
overhead for IT in terms of management and support. It is important to
remember that Visio Services does require both the Enterprise version
of SharePoint 2010 for presentation and Microsoft Visio 2010 on the
desktop of users who will create diagrams that will be published to
SharePoint.
