Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 Dashboards - Scorecards, Analytics and Planning with an Excel Dashboard as the Front End

If you haven’t heard about the upcoming Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server product, it represents Microsoft’s latest Business Intelligence solution.  Meant to power performance tracking and analysis, the product’s integration with the Office stack is its main edge.  This performance management product includes functionality from (and supercedes) the Business Scorecard Manager 2005 product and the ProClarity acquisition. The frontend of the product will be the new version of Excel.

I spotted some executive dashboard and business scorecard screenshots from this business intelligence blogger’s post on his viewing of a PerformancePoint presentation. Check out the post for a more detailed write-up. I grabbed a couple of highlights for posting here on the Dashboard Spy.

The first two screenshots show excel dashboards. The first one shows the new conditional cell background graphics. The second has columns marked in yellow to denote forecasts. The third dashboard is a balanced scorecard.

Update: As per Charlie (the source who did the hard work of capturing the screens out of the powerpoint), PerformancePoint does not rely on having Excel 12. The Office 2003 version will work fine. Thanks for the comment, Charlie.

The rest of the dashboards show peeks at the PerformancePoint Server functionality. Note the presense of the PerformancePoint Addin tab at the top of the excel spreadsheet. The last dashboard shows the business modeler screen.

Homework: Time to start studying up on the new version of Excel. There are now finally a bunch of books on Excel 2007 released.

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books on business dashboards.

PS: If you find yourself part of an enterprise dashboard effort, you must study Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing enterprise dashboards.