By Chris Alliegro [bio]
Posted: Aug. 18, 2008                            

The following an excerpt of a Research Report published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

Free! Executive Summary

PerformancePoint Server 2007, a collection of three business intelligence applications, could help large organizations streamline financial reporting and budgeting, visualize business data, and analyze and report details about business performance

Free! Introduction

PerformancePoint 2007 helps companies more effectively measure business performance, but deployment and management could challenge IT

PerformancePoint Planning Delivers Financial Tools

PerformancePoint Server 2007 introduces a component called Planning, a set of tools and services intended to solve many of the problems large organizations face with financial planning and reporting processes

PerformancePoint Monitoring Extends Scorecards

PerformancePoint Monitoring supports creation and distribution of scorecards and dashboards, which help organizations track their performance using numerical key performance indicators

ProClarity Analytics

The acquired ProClarity products deliver client tools for visualizing and analyzing data stored in SQL Server Analysis Services cubes and will probably be integrated in future PerformancePoint releases

Future Directions and Considerations

Recent releases, likely future developments, and early challenges of the PerformancePoint Server applications

Availability, Pricing, Requirements, and Resources

Pricing and system requirements for PerformancePoint Server and links to further information