Convergence Session Round Up - Wednesday

Business Intelligence was a hot topic among Dynamics customers on Wednesday at Convergence 2008, drawing a packed house this morning to hear Bill Baker, Microsoft General Manager of Business Intelligence, deliver the latest vision and product roadmap. Baker described the spectrum of BI capabilities from the perspective of the Microsoft tool set, ranging from individual-level reporting with Excel through Organization-level reporting using the newest PerformancePoint Server 2007, SharePoint Server, and SQL Server.

While PerformancePoint Server is the future of Microsoft’s BI effort, the older Forecaster and FRx products will continue to be supported with new Dynamics releases for the time being. Microsoft representatives provided no further details on a specific support roadmap for the older reporting tools. The next release grouping of BI items, which Baker labeled with the internal Microsoft release code “Wave 14”, will include a new version of PerformancePoint Server, Excel 14 (another internal release code), along with Master Data Management tools and embedded BI tools for SharePoint Server.

A brief demonstration of PerformancePoint Server 2007, with the help of Nigel Stevens of ePartners, included reporting on Dynamics AX data with re-usable, pre-defined data sets that are available to business users to create different drill-through tabular reports. They also demonstrated a more broad-based scorecard report that can be re-rendered as a graphical map using Visio integration to the data points.

Customers shared their Dynamics AX and CRM usage experiences Wednesday at an event organized by Microsoft, reflecting on the ...