I had hoped that this site on enterprise CALS which was pointed out to me might just hold some answers to the licenses and functionality for Sharepoint 2007.

Wrong, WRONG, WRONG!

It is saying that there will be a standard and enterprise version of the product and some bits on what is in each but not in nearly enough detail.

One interesting point is that is says you need an enterprise licence to use Forms Server. I have received information that contradicts this so I will have to follow it up more. This is a critical factor as I am pitching Forms Server in a Sharepoint 2003 environment and they don’t want to upgrade yet.

The worst part is STILL NO PRICES! We are weeks away from launch. I am pitching it as part of solutions as Microsoft want but I cant give any prices!

Thanks to Brian and others for pointing out a set of links to white papers and articles on reporting services.

I will be interested to read the one on localization and performance monitoring. I like the fact that in reporting services it is possible to track each stage of a reports execution performance from the ExecutionLog table.

Thinking this on a bit whilst walking to the station I was considering how good it would be if the upcoming PerformancePoint product included by default a set of performance monitoring models (cubes) and KPIs for its own operations. It would be a great differentiator and would appeal to the IT decision makers involved in making the product choice. Even better if the PerformancePoint team could talk to the MOM and server teams to produce a set of IT models.

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?

Well day three is over and I did get a lot out of it.

The PerformancePoint bits were great to see and I am looking forward to getting my hands on it. However, I do think that having seen the current gulf between the MS components and the ProClarity ones in terms of integration that the team will have their work cut out.

The Business Scorecard Manager day was a good refresh from the training course I did on it. It is a nice tool but I still think the Builder app could do with a lot of usability studies. It seems a bit disjointed at the moment. I am assured that the V2 product is much tidier.

I really enjoyed getting into Proclarity. I had always meant to get it installed and have a go but never did. I now consider it a must have. Even if it is just as a powerful cube browser and MDX generator. I shall certainly be including it in my demo stack.

It was also nice that there was a 2 way dialogue and Ryan Buma ( Microsoft’s director of business development for Office business applications) seemed to take onboard some of the points that were made. Namely:

• Microsoft need to get the BSM, Proclarity, PerformancePoint, Excel, Sharepoint, Visio and SQL Server teams locked together in a padded room with a senior exec who should be armed with a large LART. They should then decide and CLEARLY state what the message is on KPIs. There is way too much confusion about what tools fit where.
• When the teams are allowed out they should then be locked up with the Dynamics teams. It is the Dynamics product lines that will be driving the lions share of sales of the MS BI products. So get it together and make it work together. This will be even more imperative when PerformancePoint comes out. In fairness Ryan did say they were working on it but that it was hard. We know its hard!

Anyway my thanks to Ryan, Bruce Alpert, Jan Van Dijk, Andrew Sadler, Danielle and the rest of the team for a well worth will 3 days. Enjoy Munich!

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.

This is a Q & A session transcript with the corporate VP of Microsoft Office Business Applications, Lewis Levin.

I have not finished it all yet but it outlines the Microsoft Strategy for BI and in particular PerformancePoint.

It is a bit wooly in many areas with management speak taking over . I was particularly disappointed by this section.

PressPass: How does PerformancePoint relate to Microsoft Dynamics?

Levin: We’ve worked closely with the Microsoft Business Solutions team during the planning and development of PerformancePoint. The Microsoft Dynamics roadmap includes plans to take advantage of and integrate with PerformancePoint by tailoring it for the specific needs of Microsoft Dynamics customers, including specific efforts to ensure that the functionality and capabilities found in present Microsoft Dynamics BI solutions are integrated with and available as part of PerformancePoint.

It is my contention that the primary way that this will get infront of users is as a value added proposition to Dynamics sales and to existing Dynamics users. This deserves more than a couple of lines of management babble and some concrete road maps.

A couple of other useful links from John Westworth.

Tech Ed Videos.

Setting up a sample Business Catalogue for Sharepoint 2007. This one I cant wait to try.

Thanks for these.

Thanks to John Westworth for the pointer to the CRM 3.0 Business Scorecard Analyzer templates.

This will really help kick start some work I am looking to demo, along the lines of some very good data mining demos I saw at the Partner Conference.

The download is here.

Less than one week to go to the World wide Partners Conference in Boston.

I am looking to get hold of some of the input that was available to the Tech Ed attendees and posting lots of good news (maybe even some idea when we should start getting behind the Office 2007 push, or not!)

I am looking forward to seeing what they have come up with as the son of the Technical Demonstration toolkit. Something that is apparently called the Demo Showcase and is targeted at solutions rather than individual products.

Anyway if anyone else is going to be there drop a line as I hear that Boston has some palatable beers.

If anyone has a specific thing they want be to investigate that might be there then also drop me a line.

Thanks to John Westworth for some useful links on hooking up Sharepoint and Microsoft CRM.

This will be useful in the presales environment as this sort of hookup is a great way of demoing and easy to understand application within a Sharepoint environment.