posted 6/27/2010 by MarkGStacey - Views: [3763]
2005
Business Scorecard Manager Released
Nice-ish tool, pure scorecarding
2006
Microsoft buys Proclarity, one of the premier BI analysis tools for SSAS
2007
Performance Point is released.
The product is a horrible mishmash of 3 products.
Proclarity, unchanged, with it's own installer.
PerformancePoint Planning. Very much a version one, this product is MS's first and last attempt to actually attack true (financial) performance management
PerformancePoint Monitoring: BSM, plus new analytic charts and grids sourced from Proclarity. As a V2, a nice product. Some technical limitations especially when coming to Sharepoint integration though.
The product "set" carries a $30 000 plus $195 per user price tag, and uptake is VERY limited.
April 2009
Proclarity and PPS Planning are canned. Free licences to these and PPS Monitoring (which is NOT canned) are rolled into MOSS Enterprise licences.
May 2010Sharepoint 2010 is released. One of the Enterprise features is Performance Point Services, which is a VASTLY improved Performance Point Monitoring. Great product, except that it's (other immensely useful) Time Intelligence calendars ONLY work with calendar dates. (A shortcoming I'm addressing with new development now)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee661741.aspx
Not sure if I would consider the Time Intelligence feature a shortcoming since this is an extremely useful feature for users that are not your typical BI developers that work with SSAS or MDX. For the more advanced users that would want more control over the Time Intelligence they would want to build this out in the SSAS solution which would allow it to be used by additional tools such as SSRS, Excel, etc. that might not be part of a dashboard.
Perhaps I didn't elaborate enough on the Time Intelligence feature.
I honestly believe the TI is an awesome feature, and even for more advanced users represents a great deal of time saving.
However, it can only be mapped to a standard date calendar, and not a fiscal calendar.
The problem is that end users will OFTEN want to see something by fiscal period rather than calendar month - more often than not in fact.
So the difference becomes "I can drop a TI control to pass a calendar month to a scorecard (or report or what have you) in 5 minutes, but to create an equivalent to have a dropdown that will pass the current fiscal period/last fiscal period takes days of work"
To me, this is a shortcoming, a large shortcoming. I would LOVE to be able to use STPS to pass Fiscal Periods or Calendar Period, perhaps by using FiscalDay or FiscalMonth, and relying on the mapping in SSAS.
In fact, for my current project it's enough of a shortcoming that I'm coding a custom PerformancePoint to enable reusability of a filter that passes Fiscal periods.