Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007
(PPS) has now settled into the market, and
customers who need a consolidated business intelligence
(BI) and performance management platform are well
advised to consider adopting it. (For more information
about PPS, see “What Do You Care About PerformancePoint
Server?” August 2007, InstantDoc ID 96367,
and the Microsoft PerformancePoint Server Developer
Portal at msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb660518
.aspx. An upcoming article by Craig Utley in SQL Server
Magazine dives deeper into PPS as well.) Future releases
of PPS will arrive close together as Microsoft works to
better integrate the various components. Looking to those
future releases, here’s my list of top requests for changes
I’d like to see Microsoft make to PPS.
Consolidate the environment. PPS doesn’t have a
consolidated environment for developing in the Monitor,
Analyze, and Plan components. Now we have Dashboard
Designer, the ProClarity tools, and Planning Business
Modeler. Please bring them together.
Simplify installation. Installation isn’t always a snap,
and it gets tricky for distributed scenarios. It requires
setting many permissions in different places, making sure
Kerberos security is working correctly, and manipulating
Service Principal Names (SPNs) for services accounts
(setSPN.exe) to name a few tasks.
Add support for report items. In the Monitoring and
Analysis areas, there’s no support for outgoing filter links
on report items in dashboards. We need this support.
Add an “action” feature to Key Performance Indicators
(KPIs). This feature could be similar to an Analysis Services
Action that lets you launch another PPS view, open
a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) report, and jump
to another application when you select a KPI.
Enable sharing of dashboard filters. Dashboard filters
aren’t First Class Objects. Please change that so they can
be shared across dashboards and so we can pass values
from one dashboard filter to another.
Add finer control over dashboard layout. Too much
dashboard real estate is wasted (e.g., dashboard filter
drop-downs are hard coded at 400 pixels wide in tree
and multi-select layouts) irrespective of data contained
therein.
Add support for passing multiple Time Intelligence
(TI) filter values from multiple data sources to the same
scorecard. I’d like to see added support for building a
scorecard with Actual sourced from an OLAP cube and
Budget sourced from a tabular data source. Currently TI
filter values are only applied to one data source.
In the Monitoring and Analysis areas, I’d like to see
Microsoft remove Office Web Component (OWC) dependencies
in all the report types. Here’s what I’m hoping for
in support features:
- More ProClarity Analytic Server (PAS) chart types as
well as support for PAS multi-chart capability.
- Support for sparkline creation (i.e., Edward Tufte's concept
of embedded high resolution graphics the size of
the text around them) in scorecards and reports.
- Completion of ProClarity product integration.
In the Planning area, I’d like to see Microsoft add the
following features:
- Many-to-Many dimensions support. (Not all Cost
Center dimensions require budgeting for all Expense
Account dimensions, and there's no clean way to link
the two dimensions to display only the relevant Expense
Accounts for each Cost Center.)
- Graphical support for workflows.
- An interface that helps a financial analyst implement a
business rule without having to learn T-SQL, MDX, or
PerformancePoint Expression Language (PEL).
- Simple synchronization
with SQL Server Analysis
Services (SSAS) dimensions
already in existence
on SSAS servers so you
don’t need to re-create
them in PPS and then
maintain them manually.
- Visualization capability
in the Application/Model Site/Model hierarchy BPM.
- Ability for end-users to add Dimension members from a Microsoft Excel interface (a common customer
request that might be opening Pandora’s box).