Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

17.3. Microsoft Performance Point Server 2007

In the previous section you learned ProClarity is the foundation of the analytics for Performance Point Server 2007. Performance Point Server (PPS) provides you with tools to help your business users monitor, analyze, and plan your business requirements. Performance Point Server is a separate product and providing examples on PPS in this chapter is not in the scope of this book. However, we would like to point out that PPS leverages and builds on top of SSAS.

Using PPS users can create business dashboards or scorecards from their own or imported KPIs from SSAS using the Dashboard Designer to be later stored within PPS for future monitoring and taking actions based on the results. Users typically have access to SharePoint and the dashboards are typically integrated into your Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Users have the ability to subscribe to the KPIs using SharePoint's web component. Figure 17-82 shows the PPS Dashboard Designer. You can see the Dashboard Designer allows you to connect to data sources, define KPIs, and then publish them on your PPS. Figure 17-83 shows the KPIs published on to a SharePoint server, which can then be accessed by the end users. The users can monitor these published KPIs and take appropriate actions based on their status. We recommend you get a more in-depth understanding of PPS from the tutorials and whitepapers available at http://www.microsoft.com/bi/products/performancepoint-overview.aspx

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