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Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Cubegeek: Microsoft PPS: Dead.

This site will soon be called www.performancepointed.com I think.

Per-for-mance-Point-ed - definition:  To develop a planning & forecasting tool for the masses and bring the role of IT back into to Finance, and then communicate that you are discontinuing the tool after planning & forecasting cuts, and realizing many of the masses don't have multiple SQL Server Enterprise Edition and Sharepoint servers just laying around.

Disappointment indeed. It's now official. I can say with finality that I wasted a year in my career.

Cubegeek: Microsoft PPS: Dead.

Demand for PerformancePoint jobs in the UK experienced almost a 25% increase year over year.

If that was a stock I would probably be selling it.  Nice return and unsustainable growth?

Speaking of stock...

image

The trendline on this doesn't look very good, though I would suspect that we have some bottoms around here.  MS hasn't seen 18 bucks since the Asian crisis of 1998. 

image
From ITJobsWatch

I guess that intangible benefits like CFO visibility and the "potential" of Windows/Office 2007/SQL Server 2008/Sharepoint license sales and adoption don't matter in an economic downturn. Or perhaps the "what-if" analysis MS built for themselves was too good for their own good?  Maybe they forecasted something they didn't want to see?

I have been working with Planning since CTP2 and am a certified PPS Planning Trainer.  When they demo'ed Performance Point (Business Scorecard Manager) way back in 2005 at a partner convention I went to in Redmond, there was some serious excitement there.  Finally, MS would have the proper client tools for Analysis Services to compete with other OLAP vendors on, instead of some Office Web Components and a pivot table. 

Planning was just a bonus.  Bonuses get cut back in economic downturns... unless you're a bank, or a certain bank CEO. (Isn't MS a bank too?)

The good news is that PPS Monitoring is now free with Sharepoint (or is it Sharepoint is now free with PPS?).  Now if they would only release the source code for Planning & Management Reporter (and why not toss in Proclarity Desktop too?) so we can go back to building custom-tailored planning solutions without the constraints of a packaged planning tool... and have the ability to fix some of the troublesome bugs and performance issues inherent in a V1 product.

At least give us the source code for that Excel add-in reporting tool.  Lots of good possibilities there.

Nothing wrong with a little .NET code to solve some business issues.  So much more fun debugging rules in Visual Studio than trying to debug and maintain rules in a client tool like the PPS-P GUI.  Planning should have been a web application to begin with.  Keep it in the cloud guys...

Well, I'm off to develop the "yellow cell input" feature checkbox on the Excel 2007 ribbon.  The checklist for getting mine to work should be a bit shorter than the current "yellow cell input" checklist for Planning. 

1. Click the 'yellow cell input' checkbox in Excel 2007 (or just format the cell as INPUT).
2. Input your values.
3. Add your commentary next to the values.
4. Publish to your database and refresh the cube.

This was probably how Biz#/Planning got started too... 

I think we're on step #6 of the definition for performance at Microsoft.

per·form·ance [ pər fáwrmənss ] (plural per·form·ances)

noun

Definition:

1. artistic presentation: a presentation of an artistic work such as a play or piece of music to an audience

2. manner of functioning: the manner in which something or somebody functions, operates, or behaves
a high-performance car

3. working effectiveness: the way in which somebody does a job, judged by its effectiveness ( often used before a noun )
performance-related pay

4. thing accomplished: something that is carried out or accomplished

5. accomplishment of something: the act of carrying out or accomplishing something such as a task or action

6. display of behavior: a public display of behavior that others find distasteful, e.g. an angry outburst that causes embarrassment ( informal )

7. linguistics language produced: the language that a speaker or writer actually produces, as distinct from his or her understanding of the language.
See also  competence (sense 3) parolen (sense 5)

http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_1861724999/performance.html

Sacha has more info.

http://blogs.adatis.co.uk/blogs/sachatomey/archive/2009/01/29/rip-performancepoint-planning.aspx

So does Ajay.

http://ppsinfo.blogspot.com/2009/01/pps-planning-is-being-discontinued-what.html

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