In preparation for the release of Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 we're putting together a draft of the Beta 2 to final release upgrade instructions to be shared with the community.  

Here is what we have so far:  

1. 1.              Back up your metadata database, its name is “ScorecardServer” by default, to ensure that it isn't deleted, and remove it from the old location.
2. 2.              Create a workspace with all elements in your BSM Beta 2 system and save it on your hard drive.
3. 3.              Go to Control Panelà Add Remove Programs and uninstall Beta 2 Builder.
4. 4.              Run Go to Control Panelà Add Remove Programs and uninstall Beta 2 Server.
5. 5.              Run the RTM server.msi to install Scorecard Server RTM.
6. 6.              Run the RTM builder.msi to install Scorecard Builder RTM.
7. 7.              Open your saved BSM Beta 2 workspace file with all original elements in the Maestro Builder RTM workspace.
8. 8.              Click Publish All to send the metadata to your server.
9. 9.              Go into Sharepoint and replace any Beta 2 Web parts with RTM Web parts.

Known issues with this upgrade scenario:

1. Enhanced alerting functionality may require Beta 2 scorecard views to be re-configured. Scorecards that have Beta 2 alerts on them need to have those alerts removed and then re-added using the RTM builder.

2. Report view height and width settings now required for rendering. Beta 2 report views that have this blank will need to specify these settings to render correctly.

Key differences between Beta 2 and RTM:

• Changes in views
• Refresh now scrolls the screen to the appropriate location. You should notice this when changing report views.
• All HTML tags in metadata are now encoded to prevent inadvertent scripting errors. While the technique of adding a mailto: link for KPI owners to automatically send email with on click from the owner’s column will no longer work and instead the link will have to be used in a report view.
• Annotations now work on fixed value cells as well as multi-dimensional ones. This makes the end-user experience more seemless across multi-dimensional and flat sources.
• Drilldown icon (looks like a pie) replaced with +/- icon in column and row headers. Usability feedback showed the +/- icons were more approrpriate.
• Ability to hide all rows in a scorecards added. In the case where you'd like to have two difference scorecards driven by a shared page filter, you can create a "master scorecard" with the appropriate page filters, hide all its contents, and connect it to two subordinate scorecards (without page filter) using SharePoint client side connections. This lets you control the subordinates with the master page filter information. (Tim Kashani, I hope you add this to your book or training sessions, it's a really neat trick)
• Export of scorecards to both SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 (CTP 15) and 2000 now complete. The blocking issue we had with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services was resolved.

• Report view "Areas" now called "Groups". These are the logical groupings of report views, which are in turn displayed in the report view webpart.
• In the scorecard view editor the term "Alerts", referring to "things a scorecard editor creates to enable end users to be notified when certain events happen" are now called "Alert templates". So in the final release "Alert templates" are what are used to create an end-user "Alert". Previously "Alert Templates" and "Alerts" were called the same thing.

• Time intelligence now honors data filters. This enables forecast numbers combined with actual numbers to be projected into the future while time intelligence is enabled.
• Scorecard View Editor->Toolbars now have complete show/hide functionality.
• Most Recenty Used dropdown list now available in builder wizards where you need to specify a server connection. This is a really nice feature, particular when you're managing multiple instances

• Alerting now can be done columns. So if you want to say “if any of my forecast numbers are off, send me email”.
• Alerting now supports separation of SQL Notification Services client and database components. The broadest data center deployment requirements should now work.
• Sidenote: The requirements of some of our TAP customers, as well as MSIT, were fantastic, almost to the point of Zen (tell me grasshopper, how would your application work given that I need to run 10,000 SharePoint instances need to run on a single virtual site).
• Alerts can now take email from Active Directory if SharePoint profile is empty. If Active Directory is also blank, then you can hand enter the email as a last resort.  

• SystemVersion table added in database.
• Some minor changes to the Client DLL API have been made. Final release documentation available at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D2F8C636-602D-4744-BA7D-D3821F8920D5&displaylang=en

This is just a draft, there a lot of additional very minor changes here and there, please let me know if there's anything you feel requires additional clarification.

Thanks!