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As promised in August, Microsoft yesterday launched Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 as their flagship Business Intelligence offering. PerformancePoint Server 2007 enhances and replaces Microsoft’s previous Office Business Scorecard Manager Server 2005 (whew) and also incorporates advanced visualization and analysis technologies from ProClarity which Microsoft acquired in April 2006.
Microsoft took the opportunity yesterday to tout its strength in the Business Intelligence (BI) market and announce that Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 would be launched on September 19.
Yesterday Microsoft released another Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, the performance management function server in their Business Intelligence offering:
This release combines Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005, recently acquired ProClarity technologies and new innovations in business modeling and planning, budgeting, and forecasting.
The final release is expected in the second half of 2007. Scorecard Manager 2005 is being subsumed by this release of PerformancePoint.
Microsoft today confirmed the popular suspicion that Katmai, the next version of SQL Server, will ship in 2008. Feature details are currently sparse, but one interesting aspect is that Microsoft is acquiring SoftArtisans Inc.’s OfficeWriter for managed report authoring in Microsoft Office with Katmai. Microsoft’s Russell Christopher suggests that “this is a huge win for folks who want to render reports to Word and/or use the lighter-weight Excel rendering extension SoftArtisans has created.”
Update: Also mentioned was Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 which is scheduled to launch in the second half of 2007.
