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Microsoft has added yet another server to its Office 2007 line up. This PerformancePoint Server 2007 is focused on spreading business analytic tools across a corporation. The latest addition is Microsoft's attempt at creating a centralized business intelligence (BI) platform that incorporates popular Office applications. The software major hopes to steer users away from a plethora of competitive platforms and stand alone BI tools in favour of an integrated platform from a single vendor. PerformancePoint Server 2007 puts data and business rules on a centralized server and integrates them with scorecarding, analytics, planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidation and financial reporting tools to help users better understand their businesses. Excel, Outlook and Internet Explorer will be the client side interfaces into PerformancePoint. The server also will be integrated with portal capabilities via SharePoint Server due to ship with Office 2007 later this year. Microsoft also plans to integrate the PerformancePoint features directly into future version of its Dynamics ERP financial application suite. PerformancePoint also includes a feature called Business Modeler, which lets business analysts manage rules, roles, and workflows without involvement from IT. So far, Microsoft's efforts on business intelligence infrastructure have focused around the SQL Server, which includes data integration services, analytical queries, data mining and reporting services. Microsoft also has a number of Business Intelligence Accelerators for Office. Office 2007 will include BI tools called Excel Services. Microsoft is incorporating its Business Scorecard Manager with analytic and visualization technologies from ProClarity, which it acquired in April. The ProClarity Analytics Server lets users publish collections of views onto a middleware server for centralized access to analytical information. Microsoft said that there are more than 100 new BI solutions under development for the Microsoft BI platform. The company did not announce any pricing or licensing for PerformancePoint but said it is beginning a technical advisory program (TAP) around PerformancePoint and is now accepting applicants. The Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 will go into beta in November and ship in mid-2007.
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