Microsoft: Confusion and Carelessness Trying to Clarify Conflicts
August 1, 2008
MSDN is often a life saver for my team and me. Let me tell you. Every day brings new challenges when working with Microsoft’s enterprise servers.
We identified an MSDN Web log “Norm’s Performance Point Server Blog”. You can read the posts here. I don’t know Norm, but he seems to know Performance Point quite well. If you are not familiar with this Microsoft server, let me give you a quick overview. This is not my write up. The description comes from a Microsoft Web page I downloaded late last year, but it’s close enough for horse shoes:
Microsoft Office Performance Point Server 2007 is an integrated performance management application designed to help improve operational and financial performance across all departments and all levels of your organization. With Office Performance Point Server 2007, you can monitor progress, analyze what is driving variances, and plan your business from budgeting to creating management reports. You can have metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), and reports delivered to every desktop through intuitive scorecards, dashboards, and the easy-to-use 2007 Microsoft Office system environment. A key component of the Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) offering, Office Performance point Server 2007 can help you understand how performance can align with personal and departmental goals and objectives.
The SharePoint server also does business intelligence, which confuses this addled goose. In 2007, we had to work with Microsoft Dynamics and discovered that it too had some business intelligence functions. In fact, after the project was completed, we discussed the duplication, inconsistencies, and unnecessary confusion Microsoft’s product groups seemed to delight in generating. I don’t understand how folks can’t talk about ways to make the customers’ life easier. The business intelligence functions are dedicated to complexity.
Noah was to come to our rescue. You can read his Web log post, dated July 31, 2008, we think. The date appears in the comments section, leaving us with some ambiguity. He writes:
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 addition 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 Performance point 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 based) have been able to add elements of BI.
Noah, you have nailed the problem. I think that “seemingly overlap” is a very courteous way of saying that mere mortals can’t figure out what Microsoft product does what.
The bulk of the Web log post consists of tables that purport to clarify these confusing elements. If you look at the post shown here as a screen shot, you will see a series of tables. It’s pretty obvious that these tables have three columns and some clunky formatting that cuts off the right hand side of each table. Look for yourself at the Web page or the screen shot:
Now let me tell you about the carelessness and confusion. Norm’s tables contain more information than the Microsoft Web log earthworm layout can display. I guess I am not in such a hurry, and I generally want to make certain that I present content that a reader can access.
Here’s my rework of these tables. I have included the missing content that Norm’s presentation obfuscates.
The first table presents information about “Monitor” which means to know what the heck is going on with a complex business intelligence system:
| Features | Perf Point | SharePoint BI | Comments |
| Dashboard Designer | Yes | Yes | None |
| Scorecard and KPI Elements | Yes | Yes | SharePoint’s KPIs are displayed in customized document list. Excel Services allows users to build scorecards in Excel and display them inside SharePoint. Performance point Server allows drill down. |
| Reports | Yes | Yes | See Reports below |
The second table presents information about “Analyze”, which I think means to figure out something from the data.
| Feature | Perf Point | Share Point 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. All available in a thin client with trusted data as the hub. |
| Excel services | Yes | No | Excel Services allows Web access to workbooks. Excel interface is a familiar end-user analytics tool. |
The third table is “Plan” which is using the tools to forecast and budget; that is, enjoy spreadsheet fever:
| Feature | Perf Point | SharePoint BI | Comment |
| 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. Integrates with Excel, Outlook, and SharePoint for workflow and collaboration. |
| Excel Add In | Yes | No | Companion to PPS_Planning Business Modeler. Excel add-in can populate a spreadsheet with financial data and allows annotations. |
The fourth table is “Report,” which is getting data out of the system. I admit I use Crystal Reports.
| Feature | Perf Point | SharePoint BI | Comment |
| 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. |
Okay, now you have the obfuscated data. After reviewing the comments, we noticed a number of points that underscore the serious disorganization within the Performance Point and SharePoint servers. I may dig into the SQLServer issues in a future post. Such carelessness! I guess some people are too busy and too important to make tables that a customer or a consultant can actually use. I won’t pick on the comments, which are chock full of ambiguities as well. That’s enough Microsoft rework. I want to watch the basketball game.
Stephen Arnold, August 1, 2008
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