Microsoft Office 2007 Trial Edition is now available: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2d1189bf-d86a-4acf-9dcc-4d61f500ad6d&displaylang=en

 

More on Office 2007 here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2007

 

It's mind blowingly awesome, the improvements to any of Outlook, PowerPoint or Excel alone are nearly enough to justify the upgrade of whole suite,

Came across an interesting whitepaper on how to bring data from SAP BW into SQL Server Analysis Services, the multi-dimensional database engine with which Business Scorecard Manager is integrated: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/servlet/prt/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/7d63ec90-0201-0010-a2a7-898c08c589f8.

 

 

Someone internal at Microsoft had sent me the article, I did a web search and found it on Mosha's site (http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/mosha/comments/15810.aspx) but for some reason the links on his site were broken so I had to do a little more searching on the article title to find it again on the SAP web site.

 

If the link in this article every breaks, I'd highly appreciate someone from the community posting the updated link as a comment :)

 

In scorecarding there's a common concept of "balancing" metrics that are monitored so that things aren't too heavily weighted towards one area. For example, a purely financial scorecard is not terribly useful as finance is typically a lagging indicator (After all the deals are done and revenue and expenses counted, out comes a magic number). When finance is combined with upstream metrics, such as sales, pipeline and spend data, then cause and effect relationships can start to be gleaned and companies can start evaluating potential business decisions to get where they want to be. It's the early warning "indicators" that enable businesses to move deliberately into the future rather than reacting to events.

 

One set of upstream metrics that organizations are seeing as a growing priority is around their company social responsibility (CSR) policy; this is commonly around guidance from groups and initiatives such as the Fair Labor Association, Global Reporting Initiative, SA8000. In Microsoft Dynamics it's starting to become a top priority for customers and the convergence of dedicated CSR applications with ERP and Business Intelligence technologies is becoming more quickly pronounced.

 

 

 

I've been serving as the technical editor on the project, hopefully when it comes out in January the community will get some good mileage out of the efforts.

Finally, we can talk about PerformancePoint Server, the follow-on version to Business Scorecard Manager 2005 and the ProClarity investments, press coverage here: