The recent announcement to make PerformancePoint Server 2007 part of Sharepoint Enterprise 2007 came as a bit of a surprise but when you think about it, it makes sense. The announcement is very carefully worded so that it is understood that only the Monitoring and Analytics parts of PPS 2007 are being moved over on April 1st 2009. So what’s happening to the Planning module?
When Microsoft acquired ProClarity in 2006, I thought it was a great move. A market leader in the newly evolving Visualization space, ProClarity could quickly supplement Microsoft’s Business Scorecard Manager giving a rapid-build solution for dashboard style applications. So when the tools were morphed into PerformancePoint Server 2007 it looked a good deal at under $200 per CAL or $20,000 per server.
The Monitoring and Analytics functionality was supported using dashboards, scorecards, reports and KPI’s with a centralized monitoring database and Sharepoint Server as an integrated portal to publish through. But there was also a new Planning module that was marketed for business process re-engineering, budgeting and forecasting at the enterprise level. That module always puzzled me, since the skillset required to understand the functionality might be obtained by attending several years at Harvard Business School. Not your average IT developer skills.
So the rapid development of dashboards and scorecards with analytics is still there in PPS 2007 and will now be part of Sharepoint 2007. That’s great functionality. It’s difficult to know where the Planning module will land, but the smart money is on some sort of integration with Microsoft Project. If you sift through the announcements and Q&A’s there’s no mention of its future.
Of course, they could let it fail, but I am sure someone at Microsoft will think up a bailout strategy. Now the question is: should the developers get their bonuses?
Cheers Brian
