MS PerformancePoint Server 2007

PerformancePoint Server 2007 aims to help organisations control their performance by providing a platform to monitor, analyse and plan their business, whilst driving alignment, accountability and insight across their entire organisation.

PerformancePoint provides all of the functionality needed for performance management in a single, integrated application including scorecarding, analytics, planning, budgeting and forecasting in a cross enterprise capability to support all users in the business.

Performance Point Server Development

A brief look into how PeformancePoint Server was developed over the past 10 years. [4:07]

Feature Capabilities

The four main areas of capability PerformancePoint provides are:

1. Pervasive Performance Management
2. Setting of Business Rules
3. Flexibility
4. Automated Creation & Maintenance

Pervasive Performance Management

PerformancePoint enables information on an enterprise's performance to be available to all employees in an organisation, and supplied in a way they helps them understand the factors impacting the business. This supports better decision making and subsequent actions that deliver improved performance.

PerformancePoint also supports collaboration between users and monitoring using "personalised" scorecards via the familiar MS office environment.

Setting Business Rules

Business rules define how a business wishes to operation. PerformancePoint provides the flexibility for business users to define, modify and maintain their plans; whilst the application manages the complexity of the business processes [rules, logic, calculations, and workflows]. Business rules are centrally managed and fully auditable.

Flexibility

With todays ever changing and complex environment, performance management systems must be both flexible and controllable, whilst also being easy to set up and maintain. To provide this, PerformancePoint server uses a "model driven" approach to enable organisations to create a "corporate model". This model can be used at any level in the organisation to provide a consistent view of the entire organisations performance.

Automated Creation & Maintenance

Automating the creation and deployment of performance management information means programming is not required and deployment time and complexity reduced. This also significantly reduces time to implement and the ongoing demands placed on the IT department. Avoiding the need for programming speeds deployment and also reduces implementation complexity. PerformancePoint Server 2007 enables businesses to broadly deliver performance management across the organisation by bringing together the power of Microsoft Office and the performance, scalability and security of SQL Server.

The Technology

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 leverages SQL Server 2005 to provide plans, analytics and scorecards that provide complete business performance management for users at all levels of the enterprise.

Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 tightly integrates with Microsoft Office Excel [2003 and 2007]. It also includes advanced web based scorecards and dashboards that deploy in a SharePoint environment.

PerformancePoint Server Monitoring follows on from Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005.

More on PerformancePoint

PerformancePoint Server Developer Portal

PerformancePoint Monitoring Server

PerformancePoint Monitoring Server consists of four server components and a system database. This includes two clients, two middle tier servers and one back end server:

Clients

• Dashboard designer
• Web browser viewing dashboards.

Middle Tier Servers

PerformancePoint Monitoring Server - where dashboard designer communicates to create dashboards. This server creates a web site with three virtual directories, each with distinct capabilities.

• Monitoring Server Web Service - facilitates the communication between the Dashboard Designer client and the Monitoring System database.
• Dashboard Web Preview - provides the capability to deploy and view dashboards as ASP.NET web pages.
• Dashboard Designer Installation Site - allows users to download and use the Dashboard Designer on demand [where the web browser views the dashboards]

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 - with PerformancePoint Dashboard Viewer is an interface with SharePoint Services, enables deployment and viewing of dashboards on a particular SharePoint Site.

Both the middle tier servers can be network load balanced and can grow to accommodate the user demand.

Back End Server

Monitoring Server System Database - resides on SQL Server 2005 SP2 server. This is the database that is used by the all PerformancePoint Monitoring servers and can reside in a SQL cluster to improve performance. The data sources for the dashboard can be scaled [based on the technology] but are more efficient means is caching of the queries to the data sources.

Interfaces

PerformancePoint Scorecard Viewer for Reporting Services - an interface that Monitoring Server provides for SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, that enables the viewing of Scorecards in Report Definition Language (RDL) format.

Plug-Ins

PerformancePoint Monitoring Plug-in for Report Designer - This component installs a data processing extension (DPE) for Reporting Services Report Designer in Visual Studio 2005. This DPE enables the customization of Monitoring Scorecards that are saved as RDL files.

Installation Configuration

All the server components in Monitoring Server can be installed on a single computer. This standalone deployment is used primarily for testing, development, and proof of concept for Monitoring Server.

Alternatively, The five server components of Monitoring Server can be installed in a distributed manner. That is;

• Monitoring Server System Database
• Monitoring Server
• Dashboard Viewer for SharePoint Services
• Scorecard Viewer for Reporting Services
• Monitoring Plug-in for Report Designer
  

NEXT: Microstrategy

Back To Top