Introduction

PerformancePoint Server 2007, a collection of three business intelligence (BI) applications released in Sept. 2007, could help large organizations streamline financial reporting and budgeting, visualize business data, and analyze and report details about business performance. PerformancePoint Server could also strengthen Microsoft’s hand in the increasingly hot BI applications market. However, PerformancePoint Server’s complexity could challenge early adopters that jump in without the assistance of a knowledgeable partner.

PerformancePoint Server 2007 is a collection of server and client applications and database components that together support corporate performance management. This loosely defined term refers to the processes that organizations use to track and report important business measures, which can range from individual and team goals to companywide financial results, and to improve overall business health and performance. Typically, performance management products such as PerformancePoint Server aid these processes by extracting, consolidating, and summarizing information from strategic business data sources, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and presenting that information to users in a form that makes important goals and progress toward them easily discernable.