Ok I am now REALLY jealous of all the BI people at the conference!

This post covers my slight disappointment at there not being more PerformancePoint news coming out of the conference but it seems the best is yet to come.

It hints at a demo using PerformancePoint and Microsoft’s Surface technology.

Now Surface is a touch sensitive table that allows users to manipulate images and items using their fingers. I would love to see how a presentation of a BI and forecasting tool will be deployed to such an interactive medium. I hope there is a video!

Craig Schiff has an interesting post on the plans underway at Hyperion. It seems that they are adding 50 consolidation customers and 100 planning customers a quarter and have a marketing strategy based around "best of breed".

I wonder how well this will hold up over the coming year with Microsoft wading into the arena with PerformancePoint?

With thanks to Yuri who pointed me in the direction of Craig who has pointers to a whole range of materials around the performance management shake up that is going on.

Craig has a short piece on Performance Management 2.0 which he describes as an outgrowth of the core performance management that many companies have in place.

The 2.0 tag will become truer as the Microsoft PerformancePoint impact becomes clearer. In Craig’s words;

The area with the greatest potential payback is operational analytics. This really brings performance management to all areas of the company and makes it meaningful and relevant to each of those areas.

The emphasis is mine but I think that it shows how the Microsoft mentality of "pile them high sell them cheap" and get the information in front of those that can act on it will drive the market going forward. 

It is also interesting to see how the likes of Business Objects are starting to align their portfolio of products to ensure that they maintain the same level of coverage as Microsoft are expected to offer.

Way back at the Microsoft Partner Conference I saw a short demo of RSInteract. This is a totally web based report building tool that sits over SQL Server Reporting Services (2000/5)  and I was impressed.

Today I had a web demo of it again including the new OLAP report building in the new release. As always in a demo there is a lot to take in but some of the things I really liked were:

• It is very light weight being a pure web app.
• The ability to edit an existing report is very easy.
• The user can preview the changes without having to commit them.
• Multiple combinations of tables and graphs can be built into one report. This is a really nice feature.
• The functionality and UI has been broken up in a nice easy to understand manner.
• None of the underlying Reporting Services power and functionality has been lost. It is just made easier.

The down sides to this silver bullet of report writing are:

• It does not use the report models for relational data sources. You have to create and expose views for the end user.
• there is an additional cost over and above SQL Server Licences. That said when compared to other ad-hoc report builders in the market it is still cheap with what appears to be much greater functionality.

I have just installed it and will be evaluating it myself over the coming week so more later.

Does anyone have any experiance with this product or something similar for comparison?

I liked this post and some of the points it made. It has also triggered me to get the book being quoted.

I did like this point:

The paradox of choice is a relatively simple concept – when presented with too many options, we are more likely to choose nothing at all. Doh! Barry Schwartz has written a whole book about this concept (guess what the title is!).

Well worth a read.

I saw on the BBC News site that Google have re-launced their online spreadsheet "in yet another challenge to archrival Microsoft."

Well as I have a few mins spare this morning I decided to give the re-launched product a look.V1.1.6b (I passed on it the first time around)

According to Google the main re-launch seems to be:

• Having a unified entry point with Writely
• Multiple Lines in a Cell
• Public sharing
• Printing ability
• Cell borders
• The ability to insert columns, rows and sheets

Having had a play for half an hour my conclusion is that its ok if you are doing lists and simple small spreadsheets or if concurrent collaboration is a big requirement. If you need to do more or the collaboration features are not a must then I dont see any reason to use this as opposed to Excel or any of the other free spreadsheets available.

Update: Robert Scoble asks if Microsoft have heard Google starting their engine. I would say that yes they have – they have a better already developed in Excel Services and are establishing the Office Live brand. Where they are doing better than Google is thinking about who their audience really is and working it through. They are looking at the placement of spreadsheets in a company, interacting with other back office systems like CRM, distribution within a company structure and so on. I would suppose that 90% of spreadsheet users are within a business environment and to work in that environment you need a much bigger proposition that the one being put forward by Google.

I would say that Microsoft have heard the Google engine but it is in the distance because it is racing in a different race.

Its a business and market issue and not a technology issue.

Ian Tien points out that Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 will have the usual Microsoft snappy title and will be released Summer 2007.

I have not fully explored the links as the connection I am on is Very slow.

If you are after a closer view of some screen shots I see that the source presentation from the announcement is now available. I think that the screens on the Biz# management console dont do it justice.

Thanks to Erik who says that Business Scorecard Manager Rollup 4 is now out

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b122139c-6625-456a-9f39-f8a8fb0246a2&DisplayLang=en

From the KB:

Issue that the update rollup fixes

This update rollup fixes the following issue that was not previously documented in a Microsoft Knowledge Base article:

Thanks to Brian for pointing out this excellent post on Reporting Services 2005 best practices.

It also contains a good range of sample code for achieving some nice features. I haven’t got through it all and I suspect that there are a number of other equally good posts on the site to explore.

I must make time to clean up some of my content and post it. Maybe next week!

Whilst digging out some paperwork from my boss’ desk I spotted a box marked ProClarity. Inside I found a complete partner evaluation set for ProClarity 6 and a demo setup. Should be fun to play with this and be able to demo it. It will also give insight into what PerformancePoint will be delivering. I have signed up for the Performance Point beta but unfortunately that is under an NDA.