PerformancePoint

Making every site in SharePoint 2010 into a BI Center

The other day I had an interesting and great workshop with a customer about the BI features in SharePoint 2010. SharePoint Insights is one thing that really gets me going - so much great stuff can be unleashed using Excel, Visio and PerformancePoint Services. One thing that annoys me with the default settings in SharePoint 2010 is the BI Center. A BI Center does not support the “BI for everyone” mantra - that center only turns numbers and KPI fans on. What you should do is enable BI features on all of your sites; your Intranet home page, your department sites or even on project sites etc. But it isn’t as easy as you could imagine. So here’s some tips for you all to BI-enable all your sites. Oh wait, don’t say to your end-users that you BI-enabled their site - tell them that you have Insight enabled their site instead so you don’t scare them off.

SharePoint

Last Service Pack for PerformancePoint Server 2007 is out

The long awaited service pack for PerformancePoint Server 2007 is now released to the web - Service Pack 3. This is the last service pack for PerformancePoint Server since the PerformancePoint Server bits will from next week be turned into PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint 2010. Service Pack 3 is the last update to the standalone version of PerformancePoint, which was announced in January this year when Microsoft changed their BI strategy. After this update Microsoft will not invest any further into the 2007 version and as you hopefully are aware of - the Planning module will not exist in the upcoming 2010 version. The Planning module is instead offered as source code - now called the Financial Planning Accelerator, so that you can safely still use any investments in the Planning Module.

Personal

Time for new adventures

I’m glad and proud to tell you all about that next month I will start a new job. I will start as a SharePoint Architect at Connecta. This is a fantastic opportunity for me and it will let me work with some of the finest SharePoint minds and developers here in Sweden as well as some really awesome customers. I’ve been working with basically the same company now since 2000, when I and two good friends founded it, iBizkit. We all came from consultancy firms working with WCM, portals and intranet solutions and had a dream of making a really good semi-product for these kind of solutions. And we did! In 2001 we integrated our product with the first version of SharePoint. We continued this integration in the upcoming versions of SharePoint, but have since the release of SharePoint 2007 focused more and more on the SharePoint platform, and I have personally lived in that world for the latest years. About two years ago, we sold the company to Pdb DataSystem, a natural step to expand and evolve the business.

SharePoint

SharePoint User Group meeting 2009-09-08 recap

Last night we had a SharePoint User Group Meeting here in Stockholm, Sweden. It was a great evening with a lot of attendees, thank you all for showing up. It’s always fun to see new and old faces, sorry I didn’t have time to talk so much with you (due to my VM’s crashing just before my demos…). First, a big thanks to KnowIT and Jonas who provided us with a great place to host the meeting and some good food and beer!