What's new for PerformancePoint Services (SharePoint Server 2010)

Article
07/22/2014

Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010

PerformancePoint Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is a performance management service that you can use to monitor and analyze your business. By providing flexible, easy-to-use tools for building dashboards, scorecards, reports, and key performance indicators (KPIs), PerformancePoint Services can help everyone across an organization make informed business decisions that align with companywide objectives and strategy. Scorecards, dashboards, and KPIs help drive accountability. Integrated analytics help employees move quickly from monitoring information to analyzing it and, when appropriate, sharing it throughout the organization.

Prior to the addition of PerformancePoint Services to SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 functioned as a standalone server. Now PerformancePoint functionality is available as an integrated part of the SharePoint Server Enterprise license, as is the case with Excel Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. The popular features of earlier versions of PerformancePoint Services are preserved along with numerous enhancements and additional functionality.

What's new

PerformancePoint Services includes many new and updated features and functionality. For convenience, this document separates these updates into the following two categories:

Platform integration with SharePoint Products and Technologies
New PerformancePoint Services features

Platform integration with SharePoint Products and Technologies

PerformancePoint Services builds on the platform of SharePoint 2010 Products, providing customers with a more robust deployment, scalability, and performance model. The previous version was built directly on Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and used a Microsoft SQL Server database. PerformancePoint Services is a SharePoint Server service application and uses its own database, separate from SharePoint Server content or configuration databases, to store annotations and comments in a scorecard and other temporary objects. Objects such as dashboards, scorecards, and KPIs are stored in the SharePoint Server content database. These architectural changes enable PerformancePoint Services to take advantage of SharePoint Server 2010 enterprise features.

Physical architecture

For information about the physical architecture, see the diagram in Overview of PerformancePoint Services architecture (SharePoint Server 2010), which shows the PerformancePoint Services architecture for farm deployment that utilizes three servers.

PerformancePoint Services as a service application

In SharePoint Server 2010, services are no longer contained within a Shared Service Provider (SSP). Instead, the infrastructure for hosting services is integrated with Microsoft SharePoint Foundation and the configuration of service offerings is much more flexible. The service application framework is a common service model that provides the following benefits:

A consistent management experience and shared infrastructure for all services that plug into it. As one of those services, PerformancePoint Services can provide the ability to perform bulk security operations for service applications in a farm deployment from the SharePoint Central Administration Web site.
Backup and recovery benefits include restoring a site collection, entire site content, or list content back to a previous version or point in time.
Services are installed by default; there is no SSP setup.
Sites can be configured to use only the services that are needed rather than the entire list of services.
Deploying services across sites and farms is more flexible. Similar to previous versions, a single set of services can be shared by all Web sites in a farm.

SharePoint Server 2010 as the repository

PerformancePoint Services stores data sources and dashboards in document libraries and other dashboard content in lists. The PerformancePoint Services database stores annotations and comments in a scorecard and other temporary objects. In addition, PerformancePoint Services data security and management is enhanced by the following features:

High availability (after you install SharePoint Server Service Pack 1)
Failover and up-time strategies
Backup and restore strategies
Disaster-recovery strategies
Multi-tenancy support for list content
Enterprise-level, single-security model
Authentication and authorization schemes
Trusted locations
Familiar interface for storing and consuming data

Changes to the security model

PerformancePoint Services uses SharePoint Server 2010 to manage user credentials and to secure access to dashboard content and its underlying data sources. The new and changed features of the PerformancePoint Services security model are described in the following list:

User authentication is handled by SharePoint Server 2010. Authentication of PerformancePoint Services users is validated by the SharePoint Server 2010 authentication provider.
Trusted locations are used to limit access to PerformancePoint Services content types to specific sites.
PerformancePoint Services uses the SharePoint Server 2010 security model to set permissions on dashboard content. These permissions provide a level of security that is equivalent to that found in Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, but permissions in SharePoint Server 2010 do not map directly to PerformancePoint Monitoring Server 2007 roles and permissions.

New PerformancePoint Services features

PerformancePoint Services now can utilize SharePoint Server scalability, collaboration, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery capabilities. Dashboards and dashboard items are stored and secured within SharePoint lists and libraries, providing you with a single security and repository framework. The following section provides a summary of feature enhancements.

New features and enhancements

The following is an overview of features and enhancements to PerformancePoint Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

With PerformancePoint Services, functioning as a service in SharePoint Server, dashboards and dashboard items are stored and secured within SharePoint lists and libraries, providing you with a single security and repository framework. The new architecture also takes advantage of SharePoint Server scalability, collaboration, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery capabilities. You also can include and link PerformancePoint Services Web Parts with other SharePoint Server Web Parts on the same page. The new architecture also streamlines security models that simplify access to report data.
The Decomposition Tree is a new visualization report type available in PerformancePoint Services. You can use it to quickly and visually break down higher-level data values from a multi-dimensional data set to understand the driving forces behind those values. The Decomposition Tree is available in scorecards and analytic reports and ultimately in dashboards.
You can access more detailed business information with improved scorecards. Scorecards have been enhanced to make it easy for you to drill down and quickly access more detailed information. PerformancePoint scorecards also offer more flexible layout options, dynamic hierarchies, and calculated KPI features. Using this enhanced functionality, you can now create custom metrics that use multiple data sources. You can also sort, filter, and view variances between actual and target values to help you identify concerns or risks.
Better Time Intelligence filtering capabilities that you can use to create and use dynamic time filters that are always up to date. Other improved filters improve the ability for dashboard users to quickly focus in on information that is most relevant.
Ability to include and link PerformancePoint Services Web Parts together with other PerformancePoint Services Web parts on the same page.
Easier to author and publish dashboard items by using Dashboard Designer.
SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 R2 support.
Increased support for accessibility compliance in individual reports and scorecards.
The KPI Details report is a new report type that displays contextually relevant information about KPIs, metrics, rows, columns, and cells within a scorecard. The KPI Details report works as a Web part that links to a scorecard or individual KPI to show relevant metadata to the end user in SharePoint Server. This Web part can be added to PerformancePoint dashboards or any SharePoint Server page.
Create analytics reports to better understand underlying business forces behind the results. Analytic reports have been enhanced to support value filtering, new chart types, and server-based conditional formatting.

Retired features

PerformancePoint Services no longer supports Trend Charts, PivotTable reports, PivotChart reports, ODBC data sources, Analysis Services 2000, and 32-bit server architecture.

Conclusion

By becoming more tightly integrated with SharePoint Server 2010, PerformancePoint Services takes advantage of many enterprise-level SharePoint Server 2010 features. This change in architecture results in many changes and enhancements to PerformancePoint Services.

Getting started

PerformancePoint Services is deployed as a service application in SharePoint Server. Once you have deployed your SharePoint Server farm, you can configure PerformancePoint Services.

For information about planning your PerformancePoint Services deployment, see Plan for PerformancePoint Services (SharePoint Server 2010).

For information about configuring PerformancePoint Services, see Configure PerformancePoint Services.

For information about creating dashboards, see Getting Started: PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=227259) and Create a basic PerformancePoint dashboard (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=227262).

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