Editor’s Note: This article is an excerpt from Sahil Malik’s Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Building Solutions for SharePoint 2010 (APress, 2010) and is printed with the publisher’s permission.
There used to be a product called Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager. It had some compelling monitoring and analytic capabilities. As a successor to that product, Microsoft released a product called Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server in November 2007.
PerformancePoint Server 2007 included monitoring and analytic features, such as dashboards, scorecards, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), reports, filters, and strategy maps, which are delivered via a monitoring server. There were primarily two client user interfaces to the monitoring server, namely the Dashboard Designer and various SharePoint Web Parts. The Dashboard Designer was a thick client application downloaded from the monitoring server, which allowed power users to do the following:
- Create data source connections
- Create views that use those data connections
- Assemble the views in a dashboard
- Deploy the dashboard to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)
All of this information was stored to a SQL Server 2005 database that was managed directly through the monitoring server.
Once a dashboard had been published to the monitoring system database, it could then be deployed to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Windows SharePoint Services. Therefore, in that sense, PerformancePoint Server was a product that worked in parallel with SharePoint. Yet another portion of the PerformancePoint Server was the planning center operation. PerformancePoint Planning Server supported a variety of management processes, which included the ability to define, modify, and maintain logical business models integrated with business rules, workflows, and enterprise data. Finally, there was the management report, which was a component designed for financial reporting.
That is all history! Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server was discontinued in April 2009. Before you feel sad or shed any tears for the loss, the product was instead reincarnated as PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint 2010. It is available as part of non-free versions of SharePoint 2010. It is envisioned to be quite disruptive to the marketplace that it is entering because it is a highly reengineered and well thought out product.
What is PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint 2010? PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint 2010 is the part of SharePoint that allows you to create rich, context-driven dashboards that aggregate data and content to provide a complete view of how your business is performing at all levels. In other words, it is the easiest way to create and publish business intelligence dashboards in SharePoint 2010. At the heart of PerformancePoint Services is the Dashboard Designer. The Dashboard Designer is a thick client that you can launch directly from the browser, and it allows you to create KPIs, scorecards, analytic charts and grids, reports, filters, and dashboards.
Compared to PerformancePoint Server 2007, there are many enhancements in PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint 2010. Some of these enhancements include the following:
- Enterprise-level scalability: Built upon the new services infrastructure in SharePoint 2010, PerformancePoint Services has the ability to scale out more than PerformancePoint Server 2007.
- SharePoint repository: There is no longer a separate monitoring server database. All objects that are created are now stored in the content database. This has numerous advantages centered on security, administration, backup and restore, and even the end-user experience.
- All PerformancePoint features are now SharePoint features: There is a business intelligence repository available as a site definition or you have the ability to create new sites based upon other site definitions and enable certain features to make use of PerformancePoint features in any site collection.
- PerformancePoint filters can now be connected with standard SharePoint Web Parts, because they build upon the standard WSS Web Parts connection framework.
- Integration with SharePoint also makes it possible for PerformancePoint to work with every other SharePoint feature such as search, indexing, workflows, Excel Services, and Visio Services.
- There are some significant improvements in the various SharePoint Web Parts, chart types, and the Dashboard Designer.
With this theory, let's start with the process of administrating, configuring, and using PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint 2010. Configuring PerformancePoint Services is split into two halves: one that you need to do in Central Administration and one that you need to do in the site collections you intend to use with PerformancePoint Services.