Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator

This weekend I took a look at the Office Business Scorecards Accelerator and I have to tell that I'm pretty impressed. Most of the BI solutions that I know require very high end ( and also high price) products but for people who have already an existing Microsoft based infrastructure with Windows 2003 and SQL Server, this solution is a very nice starting point to deploy a flexible scorecard solution. I'm under the impression that this accelerator is not very known within the market although it is a very good value solution. I think that the next couple of weeks I'm going to write a little bit more about how you should implement a scorecard solution based on Office Business Scorecards accelerator. So lets start of with a quick introduction...

The Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator enable employees at all levels of the organization to simplify the measurement and management of key performance indicators (KPIs) and business strategies. It does this by simplyfying the creation of so called scorecards, the mapping of real data to the measures in these scorecards and providing a customizable visualization of these scorecard. The solution is targeted at decision makers at different levels in your organisation.

Requirements:

SharePoint Portal Server or Windows SharePoint Services : required for the Scorecard Development environment.

Visio: The Visio ActiveX control (Visio 2003) is required for creating scorecards. The free Visio Viewer is required for just viewing scorecards.

SQL Server/Analysis Services: Required for the Scorecard database. Analysis Services cubes are required as scorecard data sources.

Office 2003: Required for utilizing Office Web Components and for document creation.

Main components:

Multiple scorecard & metric views: a number of webparts are out-of-box available to display the information from within your scorecards

Strategy Map Builder : enables users to easily creates strategy diagrams and integrate key performance data, by using Visio.

Scorecard Builder : user interface for building your scorecard definitions, the user interface is webbased and uses WSS or SPS

Scorecard Engine: the main component, builds your scorecards based on the on the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you define yourself. These KPIs are mapped on data which resides in your SQL Analysis Server.

II would love to hear of people who have project experience with this solution. So if you have some nice tips and tricks, sample code, ... do not hesitate to comment on this posting.