PerformancePoint Server OR SharePoint BI

Microsoft has several business intelligence (BI) tools that seemingly overlap in features. This can be confusing to those trying to determine what BI tools will be most beneficial to their company. Many software packages have added an element of business intelligence -tools that lend to better business decisions. The reason for the proliferation of BI tools extends to acquisitions Microsoft has made. An example is the acquisition of ProClarity, a powerful analytics application platform that is included in the PerformancePoint Server (PPS) license agreement.  Additionally, as BI has become more available with the increase of data warehouses technologies, improvements to ETL practices, and reporting, software packages (particularly accounting and Excel with data-loading add-ins) have been able to add elements of BI.

To resolve some confusion between the BI features in the enterprise version of Office SharePoint Server and PerformancePoint Server, I have created a chart below that shows how each tool can effectively monitor, analyze, plan (forecast), and report for the information you need to achieve corporate objectives. The basis for my review of Microsoft BI comes from literature on the Microsoft BI site and Office SharePoint Server literature. Another great source is a video by Bill Baker here. Bill describes how the following typical business questions translate into monitoring, analysis, and planning.

• what happened?
• what is happening?
• why?
• what will happen?
• what do I want to happen?

Before reviewing the tables below, consider the following.

• Both PPS and Office SharePoint Server BI tools work to extend flexible and functional data and intelligence from the individual to the team and to the entire organization.

PerformancePoint

• Is a suite of applications that encompasses all three core capabilities, monitor, analyze, and plan, to manage performance. 
• Was built specifically as a performance management solution for the enterprise but its monitoring and analytics capabilities can be used anywhere.
• Can have all of the functionality of Office SharePoint Server BI when WSS is used rather than MOSS.

MONITOR: What is happening and what has happened; Tools: dashboards and scorecards and reports

Feature	PPS	Office SharePoint Server BI	Comments
Dashboard Designer	yes	yes
Scorecard and KPI elements	yes	yes	SharePoint's KPIs are displayed in a customized document list. Excel Services allows users to build scorecards in Excel and display them inside SharePoint. PerformancePoint Server allows drill down.
Reports	yes	yes	See "REPORT" below.

ANALYZE: Why what is happening is happening; Tools: interactive dashboards (drill-down) and reports

Note: this is in addition to SQL Server Analysis Services which lets you build and centrally manage complex calculations, key performance indicators (KPIs), and data mining algorithms.

Feature	PPS	Office SharePoint Server BI	Comments
Excel	yes	yes	See how Excel is used with PPS-Planning Business Modeler under PLAN.
Advanced analytics	yes	no	PPS-analytics include graphs, key performance indicators (KPIs), data grids, and advanced visualization in order to allow multidimensional slice and dice, drill-across, drill-to-detail, root-cause analysis, and centralized business logic definitions. PPS-ProClarity also allows ad-hoc queries, various filters such as applying an MDX query template, and shows relationships between dimension hierarchies, attribute hierarchies and measures thereby simplifying the navigation of cubes. These features are available in a thin client with trusted data as the hub.
Excel Services	yes	yes	Excel Services allows Web access to workbooks. The Excel interface is a familiar end-user analytics tool.

PLAN (forecast) and budget

Feature	PPS	Office SharePoint Server BI	Comments
Planning	yes	no	PPS-Planning Business Modeler makes planning, budgeting, and forecasting part of a dynamic, ongoing performance management process. The planning application provides users with a complete, enterprise view of the data, offering consolidation, allocation, and elimination. It integrates with Excel, Outlook, and Office SharePoint Server for workflow and collaboration.
Add-in for Excel	yes	no	Companion to PPS_Planning Business Modeler. The PerformancePoint add-in for Excel can populate a spreadsheet with financial data and allows annotations.

REPORT

Feature	PPS	SharePoint BI	Comments
Reports	yes	yes	Both SharePoint and PPS can render SQL Server Reporting Services reports. In Dashboard Designer, you can expose data in a dashboard by creating supportive reports with any number of templates. See below.
Advanced financial and management reporting.	yes	no	PPS-Management Reporter is a report writer designed for financial tasks such as consolidation. It can extract from the financial data mart.  It can turn advanced financial analysis, such as sensitivity and variance analysis (for example, price/quantity/customer/product mix/timing), into easy-to-understand reports.

More REPORTS

Here is a list of report options in PPS Dashboard Designer.

• Strategy Map reports - can to display various performance measures in an organization. The strategy map uses shapes in an Office Visio 2007 diagram to show the relationships between the objectives and KPIs, and uses color to communicate how each objective or KPI is performing.
• Trend Analysis reports - offer specialized functionality and use scorecards as data sources. Dashboard users can click an individual KPI and cause the linked reports to automatically refresh and display further information that is specific to the selected KPI.
• Web Page reports - are fully functional internal or external Web site that you display in a SharePoint Web Part next to your other dashboard elements.
• ProClarity reports - include the Perspective View, Decomposition Tree, Performance Map, and analytic charts and grids.
• Reporting services reports - link to an existing Reporting Services report from within your dashboard.

DATA ACCESS AND DATA INTEGRATION

Both Excel Services and PerformancePoint Server can connect to various Microsoft data sources such as SSAS, Office SharePoint Server, or SQL Server table data, Excel spreadsheets, and ODBC compliant sources by using different tools.

PerformancePoint Monitoring Server

• PPS- dashboard analytic charts and grids must connect to SSAS. See here.
• Advanced PPS-dashboard designers can use the interfaces in the PerformancePoint Monitoring Server SDK to create a custom data source.

PerformancePoint Planning Server

• Data Import Wizard used to move data from financial sources such as Dynamics products.
• Data integration process documentation includes docs for stored procedures for creating label-based tables in SQL Server 2005.

Office SharePoint Server

• Office SharePoint Server uses the Business Data Catalog to connect to registered line-of-business (LOB) applications and configured sites, lists, and business data Web Parts.
• Web and programmatic access to Office Excel workbooks through Excel Services.
• In SharePoint, you can create a data connection libraries. It is an .odc file that can help you create a connection within Excel Services to access SharePoint libraries.

Resources

See the list of things you can achieve using PPS-Dashboard Designer here.

Philo's WebLog: Scorecards, SQL Server, or PerformancePoint?

Published Thursday, July 31, 2008 11:14 PM by normbi