Seeking Answers? PerformancePoint Services Concerns and Feedback

Deploying PerformancePoint as a service within Office SharePoint Server is an idea that may not be understood by all customers. In its initial announcement for PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint Microsoft explained the philosophy of its strategy, citing challenging economic conditions, the need to cut costs, and thus the drive to support many additional services and technologies. The biggest and best understood advantage of reinventing PerformancePoint Server as a SharePoint service is the consequent lowering of TCO for existing and potential customers. Other advantages are more subtle and more comprehensive explanations of these are forthcoming.

In this blog post we’re reaching out to our existing PerformancePoint Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 customers as well as any and all potential new customers for concerns or feedback on the recent changes. Do you have any concerns or questions that you would like answered either by the PerformancePoint or SharePoint teams? If so please hit reply and post below so that we can provide the answers you’re seeking.

Possible questions or concerns may include the following:

· My organization is currently using PerformancePoint 2007 (either the Monitoring or Planning server). Does Microsoft plan to continue using this version after the Office 14 release of PerformancePoint Services?

· My organization (or IT team) is concerned about losing a server-based product in lieu of a service on another product that we perhaps don’t own.

· My organization already uses Office SharePoint Server 2007 or an earlier version.

· My organization currently does not deploy Office SharePoint Server. Can we purchase it so that we can continue deploying PerformancePoint Services once it’s released?

Feel free to post any other questions or concerns that you may have. We promise to track down the answers you seek from one of the product teams!