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 your objectives and strategy. Scorecards, dashboards, and KPIs help drive accountability. Integrated analytics help employees move quickly from monitoring information to analysing it and, when appropriate, sharing it throughout the organisation.

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 2010 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.

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 SharePoint document libraries and lists to store content. These architectural changes enable PerformancePoint Services to take advantage of SharePoint Server 2010 enterprise features.

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.

Changes to the security model?

PerformancePoint Services stores data sources and dashboards in document libraries and all other dashboard content in lists. In addition, PerformancePoint Services data security and management is enhanced by the following features:

• 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 authorisation schemes
• Trusted locations
• Familiar interface for storing and consuming data

Any 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. In summary the new architecture 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 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.

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