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PerformancePoint Next to Join Microsoft BI Triad


Microsoft Office 2007 is fast becoming a front-end for business apps

By David Worthington
September 15, 2007 — 
Microsoft Office is taking on a new role as a familiar front end for back-end line-of-business applications. Office is now a part of Microsoft’s business intelligence technology platform and the company has added features that allow it to integrate with the new PerformancePoint Server 2007 and the unreleased SQL Server 2008, forming a triad of BI offerings.

Redmond is banking that the ubiquity of Office can entice customers to look beyond Office’s traditional roles of e-mail client, presentation creator, spreadsheet and word processor. To that end, Office Business Applications (OBA) director of marketing Andy Kamlet explained that Microsoft has made simplifying the use of Office with back-end systems a priority.

The OBA group at Microsoft is spending most of its time working on PerformancePoint and Duet 2.0, said Kamlet. Duet is being jointly developed with SAP, to integrate SAP Business Suite services with Office applications and Office SharePoint Server. PerformancePoint Server, for performance management, is due out Sept. 20. Duet 2.0 will arrive in late 2008.

Kamlet indicated that PerformancePoint is primarily targeting large enterprises, with its role-based security that provides capabilities spanning business functions such as finance, human resources, marketing, operations and sales.

The BI Triad
PerformancePoint has a unified user interface that hooks into Office’s Excel 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007. Kamlet noted that many customers already use Excel for data analysis, arguing, “Because Excel is so widely used, why not use the UI customers are familiar with? Excel is an important, well-integrated component of PerformancePoint Server.”

Although Microsoft recommends SharePoint Server for its collaborative capabilities, it is not a prerequisite, while SQL Server is because it powers key elements of PerformancePoint’s analysis, data integration and reporting services. SQL Server’s data integration services import data from DB2, Oracle and other data sources.

A data integration toolkit is available to help customers and partners build data providers for PerformancePoint, said Kamlet.

But to get the most out of PerformancePoint, customers will have to wait until next summer: SQL Server 2008 will not be released to manufacturing until the second quarter of 2008. Until then, SQL Server 2005 is the only option for early adopters. Specifically, SQL Server 2008 will increase PerformancePoint’s enterprise scalability, particularly when working with large datasets, and will add new ways to distribute data, said Kamlet.

The 2008 release of SQL Server, formerly code-named Katmai, will provide further integration with Microsoft Office front-end tools and more robust reporting capabilities, will manage and accept nonrelational data types, provide more advanced data warehousing capabilities, and support Microsoft’s next-generation ADO.NET data access framework.


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