“So long and thanks for all the fish…”

As most of you hopefully know by now,  the PerformancePoint Planning component has been discontinued by Microsoft in January 2009.   Secondly the the PerformancePoint Server suite functionality will become part of Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Edition.

I have spent the last two years focusing on PerformancePoint planning deployments for three mid-sized companies.  It is unfortunate the Planning has been discontinued but Financial Planning project are more about defining the customer budgeting and planning process than about the technology used to implement the solution.  Secondly given the level of difficulty it took to implement a successful PerformancePoint Planning project and the breadth of knowledge required to do so (PEL, MDX, Store Procedures, Dimensional modeling etc.) , the learning curve for a new product should be fairly short.

The key challenge is finding a product that can provide a  complete solution which allows the business users to create models or cubes and build and update dimensions.  Secondly a good front end is required for input the budget whether it is an Excel or Web interface or a combination of both.

In most cases Analysis Services or Essbase can be used as the backend for these types of products and it Integration Services can still be used for the Data Integration.  However there will be very few products on the Market that will be able to provide and end to end solution using only one vendor which is what PerfomancePoint could of provided in the long term.

Microsoft was on the right track with their product offering.  SQL Server 2005 provided the data store, data integration and reporting for the Performance Management applications.  While Management Reporter allowed you to easily report against a PerformancePoint Planning cube for internal and external reporting.  It will be challenging to find a solution similar to this again in the market place with the low cost of ownership that these products provided.

I am still currently working on one planning project   If you have any questions on how to do something in PerformancePoint Planning feel free to leave a comment on the site.  I will probably continue to post items on the site until the end of 2009.

Troy

Technorati Tags: performancepoint,budgeting,planning,microsoft

PerformancePoint Server 2007 SP2 Released!

PerformancePoint Server 2007 SP2 was released on December 8. Check out SP2 by viewing the post below from Microsoft's Tech Net Forum for PerformancePoint Planning:

• PerformancePoint Planning SP2

Make sure you read through the PerformancePoint Server Planning Readme file located at the bottom of the TechNet Post. Looks like the TechNet forum has a new look and feel as of December 10.

Troy

Technorati tags: microsoft, performancepoint, planning

Update the CURRENTPERIOD for a Model

Every PerformancePoint Model has a CURRENTPERIOD property. So why set the CURRENTPERIOD property? You don't have to set this property but here is some basic functionality that it can provide:

• Dynamically update the data or date range for a Form or a Report
• Set the date range for Cycle
• Use it as a variable in a PerformancePoint Rule

Go to the model that you want to set the CURRENTPERIOD for and then check out the model. In this example we are going to set the CURRENTPERIOD for an Exchange Rate model so that we can build a PerformancePoint form with a dynamic date range:

Select Schedule Current Period Updates... from the workspace action pane:

The CURRENTPERIOD is presently set December FY 2009 but we want it to be July FY 2009 which is the first period of the budget fiscal year in our PerformancePoint Application. First click Remove Last to remove the existing CURRENTPERIOD . Now click on the ellipsis to set the CURRENTPERIOD. Select the correct date and press OK.

Now select the single chevron (>) to copy the CURRENTPERIOD value to the Update Schedule section:

You can actually schedule multiple CURRENTPERIOD values which are updated based on the update time. In this case we are only going to set one CURRENTPERIOD. Click OK and then save the model. Now we can use the CURRENTPERIOD value. In order to update the of the CURRENTPERIOD in the form I am building, I need to Refresh System data as shown below:

Now I can set a dynamic date range for the Time Dimension:

Select Add Dynamic Range... . In this case I am going to set the Start of Range to 0 and the End of Range to 11 (0 to 11 represents 12 periods). Next Click OK and then OK again. The form will now dynamically display the Time members based on the CURRENTPERIOD. Refresh the form to update the time members

Here is form that I created suing the CURRENTPERIOD. Notice that the first time member is July FY 2009 which is equal to the CURRENTPERIOD and that the last member is June FY 2009 which equals CURRENTPERID + 11.

Troy

Technorati Tags: performancepoint, sqlserver, analysis, microsoft, planning